If you’re an old-school writer like me, usually the words alone are all you need. But once in a while, you need something extra.
I’m referring to all the special symbols that don’t appear on your keyboard. Maybe you need to mark something as copyrighted with a ©, or you want to rave about the £8 order of fish and chips on your recent trip to London. Perhaps you’re a mathematician who’s working with π. ¿Y qué pasa si necesitas escribir una pregunta en español?
Instead of having to dig deep into your virtual keyboard’s corners or memorize ASCII character codes, there’s a free website you can use to copy these symbols and more directly to your clipboard for easy anywhere-pasting—no matter what kind of device you’ve got in front of you.
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
Your special character cheat sheet
To look up all those extra symbols that aren’t on your keyboard, just head to Symbol.wtf.
➜ Symbol.wtf is a single-page website with a searchable list of special characters.
⌚ It takes just a few seconds to find whatever symbol you need.
✅ Clicking a symbol copies it to your clipboard so you can paste it into any text field—with no sign-ups, ads, or usage limits.
Symbol.wtf offers 195 commonly used characters, including punctuation, currency, accent letters, arrows, musical symbols, and even ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ playing card suits.
The whole list is easy enough to scroll through, but there’s also a search bar and a list of filtering options at the top. The hardest part of using it is remembering the Symbol.wtf URL, but I just think to myself “What the f‽«≠ was that symbol site again?” and that usually jogs my memory well enough.
🤔 What about emoji?
The characters you find on Symbol.wtf are not emoji, which are defined separately under the Unicode standard. If you’re typing on a phone, your keyboard almost certainly has an emoji button for looking up these symbols.
What if you’re not on your phone, though? You could bring up your computer’s emoji picker by pressing Win + . (on Windows), Fn/🌐 + E (on a Mac), or Search + Shift + Space (on a Chromebook).
📌 But if that fails for whatever reason, you could just head to Unicode.party. Much like Symbol.wtf, it’s a searchable list of symbols—which you can click to copy to your clipboard. There’s a skin tone selector at the top, and the search results are pretty much instantaneous.
Just don’t let any young folks know you’re looking up your emoji this way, because you know how they’ll respond. 🙄🙄🙄
- Symbol.wtf and Unicode.party both work in any web browser.
- They’re free to use with no ads or usage limits.
- No sign-up is required, and neither site does any tracking of your usage.
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