Copying a symbol is easy. Knowing which one you want is not
Every symbol picker gives you a wall of glyphs to click, and that solves the wrong problem. The difficulty is that several of them look identical and are not the same character, and choosing wrong fails silently weeks later, in a search that finds nothing or a sort that comes out strangely.
So every character here that has a lookalike says so, names it, and says which one to use.
The four dashes
- Hyphen, the one on your keyboard. Joins words: well-known, twenty-one.
- En dash, the width of an n. Spans a range: 9-5, Monday-Friday, pages 12-18.
- Em dash, the width of an m. The parenthetical one, though British style usually prefers a spaced en dash.
- Minus sign. Arithmetic. Drawn the same width and height as the plus sign, so a column of positive and negative figures lines up. A hyphen does not, and in a table it shows.
The micro sign and the Greek mu
Indistinguishable on screen in most fonts, and different characters. One is a unit prefix, the other is a letter of the Greek alphabet. Search a document for one and you will never find the other.
In a unit, use the micro sign. In an equation about friction, use the letter.
Feet and inches
Prime and double prime, not an apostrophe and a quotation mark. Almost everybody types the quotes, and it is why a dimension pasted into a spreadsheet or a database sorts oddly and will not match. The same two characters do arcminutes and arcseconds.
The invisible ones, which are the useful part
There is a whole category here of characters that render as nothing, and they are the reason two strings that look identical refuse to match:
- Non-breaking space. Stops a line breaking between two words. Word inserts them, and copying from a web page brings them along.
- Zero-width space. No width at all, genuinely invisible, and a frequent stowaway in copied text.
- Soft hyphen. Marks where a word may be broken. Only visible if the break happens there, so text out of a PDF is full of them.
- Byte order mark. The invisible character at the start of a file that breaks a CSV import. Excel writes one; almost nothing expects it.
Paste one into the search box and it will name it. That is the lookup nothing else offers and it turns a maddening hour into a thirty-second answer.
Three ways to write the same character
They are not interchangeable, and mixing them up prints visible gibberish.
- HTML: an ampersand, a hash, the decimal number, a semicolon. Or a named entity where one exists.
- CSS: a backslash and the hexadecimal codepoint, with no semicolon. This is the one that catches everybody the first time.
- JavaScript: a backslash, a u, and four hexadecimal digits.
All three are given for every character, along with the Windows Alt code where there is one.
When it shows as a box
That is a missing glyph, not a broken character. The font has no drawing for it, so the browser puts a box there instead. It will still copy and paste correctly.
The fix is a different font rather than a different character, so check on the device it will actually be read on: phones, printers and PDF viewers all carry different fonts from your screen, and a symbol that is fine in your browser can arrive as a box on a printed sheet.
Emoji are a different thing
An emoji is drawn in colour by the operating system, so a green tick is green whatever colour your text is, and it looks meaningfully different on Android, iPhone and Windows. A plain symbol takes the colour, size and weight of the text around it.
For a document, a spreadsheet or anything that gets printed, you nearly always want the plain one. Both are here and they are labelled.
Everything runs on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.
Common questions
How do I find out what a mystery character in my document is?
Paste it into the search box. It matches on the character itself, so you get its name and its codepoint back. It works for an invisible character too, which is the case that actually matters: a non-breaking space, a zero-width space or a byte order mark looks like nothing at all, and it is usually the reason two identical looking strings will not match.
What is the difference between a hyphen, an en dash, an em dash and a minus sign?
Four characters, four jobs. The hyphen joins words: well-known. The en dash spans a range: 9-5, Monday-Friday. The em dash is the parenthetical one, though British style usually prefers a spaced en dash. The minus sign is arithmetic, and it is the width of a plus sign so a column of figures lines up, which a hyphen does not. Everyone types the hyphen for all four.
Why are there two characters that look like a lower case u?
The micro sign at U+00B5 and the Greek letter mu at U+03BC. They render identically in most fonts and they are different characters. Use the micro sign in a unit like micrometres. Get it wrong and a search for one will never find the other, with nothing on screen to tell you why.
How do I type feet and inches properly?
Prime and double prime, not an apostrophe and a quotation mark. Almost everybody types the quotes, which is why a dimension pasted into a database or a spreadsheet sorts strangely and will not match a search. The same two characters are also arcminutes and arcseconds.
What is an Alt code and why does mine not work?
On Windows, holding Alt and typing digits inserts a character: Alt 0176 gives the degree sign. It only works on the numeric keypad, not the number row above the letters, so a laptop without a keypad usually needs the Fn key or the character map instead. The copy button here works everywhere and is faster.
Why is the CSS code different from the HTML code?
They are different languages. In HTML you write an ampersand, a hash, the decimal number and a semicolon. In a CSS content property you write a backslash and the hexadecimal codepoint, with no semicolon at all. Using one where the other belongs is the commonest way a symbol comes out as visible gibberish, so both are given for every character.
My symbol shows as a box or a question mark.
The font has no glyph for it. The character is fine and it will copy and paste correctly, it just cannot be drawn in whatever typeface is being used. The usual answer is a different font rather than a different character, so check on the device it will be read on, because phones and printers have different fonts from your screen.
Are emoji the same as symbols?
Not quite. An emoji is drawn in colour by the operating system, so a green tick emoji is green whatever colour your text is, and it looks different on Android, iPhone and Windows. A plain symbol takes the colour and weight of the surrounding text. For a document or a printed sheet you almost always want the plain one.