Dingbats and Symbols: Unicode's Decorative Characters
Long before emoji, designers and typographers used dingbats—decorative symbols, ornaments, and pictographs—to add visual interest to printed documents. Unicode inherits and extends this tradition with several blocks dedicated to symbols that are as useful on the web as they are on the printed page.
The Dingbats Block (U+2700–U+27BF)
The Dingbats block (192 characters) derives from the Zapf Dingbats typeface, designed by Hermann Zapf. It includes:
- Scissors: ✂ U+2702
- Check marks: ✓ U+2713, ✔ U+2714
- Cross marks: ✗ U+2717, ✘ U+2718
- Stars: ★ U+2605 (in Misc Symbols), ✦ ✧ ✨ (in Dingbats)
- Arrows: ➔ ➜ ➝ ➞ — directional arrows in heavy, ornate styles
- Pointing hands: ☞ U+261E (in Misc Symbols)
Miscellaneous Symbols (U+2600–U+26FF)
This 256-character block contains a wide variety of symbols from weather icons to card suits to religious symbols:
- Weather: ☀ U+2600, ☁, ☂, ❄
- Card suits: ♠ U+2660, ♡ U+2661, ♢ U+2662, ♣ U+2663
- Astrological: ♈ ♉ ♊ … ♓
- Chess pieces: ♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♙ (white) and ♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞ ♟ (black)
- Musical notes: ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬
Geometric Shapes (U+25A0–U+25FF)
The Geometric Shapes block provides squares, rectangles, triangles, circles, and diamonds in black, white, and outlined variants. These are popular in UI design for custom checkboxes, radio buttons, bullets, and rating stars rendered in pure HTML and CSS. They render consistently across platforms because they're text characters in standard fonts, not images.
Search for any of these characters by name or appearance in the character search, or browse the emoji section for the colourful successors to many classic dingbats.