Copy instead of memorising alt codes
Keyboards carry fewer than a hundred printable characters, but writing regularly needs far more: a degree sign for temperatures, a proper multiplication sign, the pound and euro together in one email, an e with an acute accent for a colleague's name. The traditional answers are alt codes you never remember, a symbol dialogue buried three menus deep in your word processor, or searching the web and copying from whichever page appears. This page is that last habit made deliberate: the characters people actually need, grouped, one click each.
Click a character and it is on your clipboard; the button flashes Copied to confirm. Paste it wherever you are writing. Everything happens in your browser, and nothing you click is uploaded or tracked.
What is in each set
Arrows cover the eight compass directions plus double-lined and hooked variants, useful for instructions, flow descriptions and keyboard shortcut write-ups. Stars and hearts are the decorative staples for ratings and social bios; note that a five-pointed star and a heart are also what review widgets use, so pasting them into plain text mimics that look anywhere. Maths gathers the signs schoolwork and spreadsheets need most: multiplication and division, comparisons, the degree sign, superscripts and common fractions.
Currency includes the pound, euro, dollar, yen and the other signs that will not be on your keyboard, whichever layout you have. Legal has the copyright, registered, trademark, service mark, sound recording and numero signs. Accents covers the French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Scandinavian letters that appear constantly in names, menus and borrowed words.
The punctuation set, and the three dashes
Punctuation is the set professionals raid most. Curly quotes and apostrophes are what typeset documents use in place of the straight marks your keyboard produces. The ellipsis is a single character, not three full stops, which stops it breaking awkwardly across lines. The section and pilcrow signs anchor legal references, daggers mark footnotes, and primes are the correct marks for feet, inches, minutes and seconds.
Then there are the dashes, the most argued-about millimetres in typography. Your keyboard's hyphen joins compound words. The en dash, a little wider, is the range dash, as in the 2019 to 2026 seasons written with a dash. The em dash, the widest of the three, is the one some styles use to punctuate asides mid-sentence. They are separate characters, not lengths of the same one, and picky editors can tell at a glance; copy the one your style guide asks for from the punctuation set.
When you need the character as code
Pasting the character itself is right for documents, emails and social posts. In HTML source, though, some characters are safer written as entities, and a pasted ampersand or angle bracket can break markup outright. The HTML escape tool converts between the two forms in both directions. For repeated substitutions across a long document, pair this page with find and replace; to check how symbols affect a length-limited field, paste the result into the character counter. And if what you are really after is decorated text rather than single symbols, the small text generator and upside down text tools are the natural next stop.
Frequently asked questions
How do I copy a character?
Click or tap it. The button briefly shows Copied and the character is on your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere with ctrl+V, cmd+V or a long press on a phone. Copying happens locally in your browser.
Why do some characters show as empty boxes?
Your device's fonts do not include a shape for that character. The character itself is still valid, and it will usually copy and paste correctly, but anyone whose fonts also lack it will see the same box. The common sets on this page display fine on almost all modern devices.
What is the difference between the three dashes?
The hyphen on your keyboard joins words, as in well-known. The en dash is slightly longer and marks ranges, like pages 10 to 20 written with a dash. The em dash is the longest and is used by some styles to punctuate asides in a sentence. Publishers care about the difference even though they look similar.
How do I type accented letters without this page?
On a Mac, hold the letter key and pick the accent from the popup. On Windows, the touch keyboard offers the same long-press, or use alt codes on the numeric keypad, such as alt 0233 for e with an acute accent. On phones, long-press the letter. Copying from here is simply quicker when you only need one.
Is anything I copy tracked or uploaded?
No. The page is a static list of characters and the copying uses your browser's clipboard directly, so nothing you click is sent anywhere or recorded.