Gothic and Old English text generator

What people search for as a gothic font, or an Old English font, is properly called blackletter. It is the dense, angular writing that scribes used across northern Europe from roughly the twelfth century until printing standardised on roman type, and it survived longest in Germany, where the fraktur style stayed in everyday use into the 1940s. Modern eyes read it as metal album covers, tattoo lettering and newspaper mastheads.

The characters this page produces are Unicode fraktur letters. They live in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block from U+1D504, and like the script alphabet next door they were encoded for maths notation rather than for decoration. Five fraktur capitals were already present in the older Letterlike Symbols block, so Unicode did not encode them twice: C, H, I, R and Z. Generators that walk the block with simple arithmetic hit those five gaps and emit nothing, which is why so many gothic generators mangle a word like "Chicago". FontVibe fetches each of the five from its real code point.

Bold fraktur, starting at U+1D56C, has no gaps whatsoever. Every letter is there, capitals and lowercase, so if you are writing something where a missing letter would be embarrassing (a clan tag, a shop name, a tattoo mockup) start with bold gothic and only switch to the lighter weight if you prefer how it looks. Neither alphabet includes digits, so numbers stay plain.

Blackletter is genuinely harder to read than roman type, and that is a design feature of the historical hand rather than a flaw in the encoding. Lowercase i, u, n and m collapse into a picket fence of near-identical strokes, and the capitals are ornate enough that some of them barely resemble their modern equivalents (the fraktur capital I and J look almost the same). Keep gothic text short. A three-word heading works. A whole paragraph is a wall of spikes that nobody will read.

The runic style on this page is a different thing worth mentioning, because people often arrive looking for one and want the other. Those are real Elder Futhark and related characters from the Runic block, used as visual lookalikes for Latin letters. It is decoration, not transliteration, so a rune standing in for your letter B is not the rune that historically spelled that sound. Fine for a username, misleading if you are trying to write actual Old Norse.

Common questions

What is the difference between gothic, fraktur and Old English?

Blackletter is the family. Textura, fraktur, schwabacher and rotunda are styles within it, and "Old English" is mostly a name that type foundries gave to their blackletter faces. Unicode encoded one fraktur alphabet, so that is what you get here, in regular and bold weights.

Why does my capital C or R look different from the rest?

Because it is a character from a different Unicode block. The five capitals borrowed from Letterlike Symbols were drawn by different designers at a different time, so in some fonts they sit slightly heavier or lighter than the rest of the alphabet. It is not a bug, and the alternative would be an empty box.

Will gothic text work in game names and clan tags?

Often, but games are the least reliable place for this. Many render text with a single embedded font that covers only Latin-1, so anything outside it becomes a box or gets rejected by the name validator. Test with two or three characters before committing to a name change you cannot undo.

Can I combine gothic with other effects?

Yes. Combining marks stack on top of substituted letters, so gothic plus a strikethrough or a light zalgo pass both work and are offered above. The order matters internally: the letter is swapped first, then the mark is attached, so the line sits on the fraktur glyph.

See also

• Cursive font generator
• Zalgo and glitch text generator
• Outline text generator