Chess and Playing Card Symbols Copy and Paste

How to type chess pieces and card suits on Windows and Mac

The card suits have short ALT codes left over from the original PC character set: hold ALT and type 3 for ♥, 4 for ♦, 5 for ♣ and 6 for ♠ on the numeric keypad. Chess pieces use the long codes, ALT 9812 for ♔ up to ALT 9823 for ♟, and every code is listed beside its character above.

In Microsoft Word, type the hex code point and press ALT + X: 2654 becomes ♔, 2660 becomes ♠. On a Mac, press CTRL + CMD + SPACE for the Character Viewer and search for chess or spade, or add the pieces you use most to the Favourites tray.

• ALT codes need the numeric keypad, not the number row.
• Windows key + full stop opens the emoji panel, which has the suits but not the chess pieces.
• On iPhone and Android, save a text replacement so a shortcut like ;sp expands to ♠.

Chess notation in one minute

Algebraic notation names each piece with one capital letter: K king, Q queen, R rook, B bishop, N knight (N because K is taken) and no letter at all for a pawn. The board runs a to h from White's left and 1 to 8 from White's side, so every square has a name like e4 or g8.

A move is the piece letter plus the destination square: Nf3 means a knight moves to f3, e4 means a pawn moves to e4. An x means a capture (Bxc5), a + means check, a # means checkmate, and e8=Q means a pawn promoted to a queen. Castling is written O-O on the king side and O-O-O on the queen side.

Figurine notation swaps the letters for the glyphs on this page, so Nf3 becomes ♘f3 and Qxd5 becomes ♕xd5. Books and magazines use it because it reads the same in every language. Always keep the file and rank in Latin letters and digits.

• Result codes: 1-0 White won, 0-1 Black won, 1/2-1/2 a draw.
• Annotation marks: ! good move, ? mistake, !? interesting, ?! dubious.
• Disambiguation: Nbd2 or N1d2 when two knights could reach the square.

Using piece symbols in text, spreadsheets and PGN files

In Excel and Google Sheets, =UNICHAR(9812) gives ♔ and the next five numbers walk through the white pieces, with 9818 to 9823 for the black ones. That is useful for a results sheet or for drawing a board in cells, where you can pair the piece character with a light or dark cell fill instead of a background glyph.

For a board drawn in a message, use a monospace font and the large squares ⬛ and ⬜. Proportional fonts give the pieces different widths and the rows stop lining up.

PGN, the standard chess file format, is strict ASCII: moves must be written Nf3 and Bxc5, never ♘f3. Same for FEN strings, which use KQRBNP for White and kqrbnp for Black. Save the figurine symbols for prose, headings and social posts, and keep the letters in the file that software has to read.

Card suit colours, and why ♥ is often black

Unicode does not assign a colour to ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣. They are text characters, so they are drawn in whatever colour your text is, which means hearts and diamonds usually arrive black. The filled and outlined pairs (♠ ♤, ♥ ♡, ♦ ♢, ♣ ♧) are two shapes, not a red and a black version.

There are three ways to get red. Use the emoji forms ♥️ and ♦️, which carry a variation selector and are painted red by the emoji font. Colour the character yourself with CSS or a font colour in a document. Or use the playing card characters like 🂱, which include the whole card face.

Bridge and poker writing often uses a four colour convention (spades black, hearts red, diamonds blue or orange, clubs green). If you are styling suits in HTML, wrap each one in a span and set the colour there, because the character itself carries no styling.

Why some of these show as boxes

A rectangle means the current font has no glyph for that code point. The chess pieces, card suits and dice faces have been in Unicode since the 1990s and are in almost every system font. The playing card block dates from Unicode 6.0, the neutral chess pieces from Unicode 12, and the domino and mahjong tiles sit in fonts many desktops do not install by default.

Fonts that cover the lot include Segoe UI Symbol and Segoe UI Emoji on Windows, Apple Symbols on macOS, and Noto Sans Symbols 2 or DejaVu Sans anywhere. On a web page, name a fallback font for the symbol range rather than trusting the visitor's default.

One oddity worth knowing: the playing card block includes a Knight between the Jack and the Queen, because it exists in tarot and in some European decks. A standard 52 card deck simply skips it.