chess card symbols
Chess and card suit symbols
Twelve chess pieces, eight card suits and the playing card set.
29 symbols · tap any one to copy
Chess & card suits
Notate chess games and openings in plain text, or dress up poker and card-game posts, tournament brackets and Discord server names.
The chess characters occupy twelve consecutive slots from U+2654 to U+265F, arranged as six white pieces followed by six black ones, always in the order king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, pawn. They were encoded so that chess literature could be set as text: books, magazines and databases needed to print a diagram or an annotation without dropping an image into the middle of a paragraph. As elsewhere in Unicode, white and black describe hollow and filled outlines rather than any colour the characters have.
A point that surprises people learning chess online: these glyphs are not how moves are recorded. Algebraic notation, and the PGN and FEN formats built on it, use plain Latin letters, so a king is K, a queen Q, a rook R, a bishop B and a knight N, the knight taking N because the king already claimed K. Every engine and every database reads letters. The piece characters are for human readers, which is exactly what they were designed for.
The card suits next door, U+2660 to U+2667, come as two matched sets of four: the solid ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ and the outlined ♤ ♡ ♢ ♧. They are the French suits that spread across Europe in the fifteenth century and became the international standard deck. Worth knowing before you build anything with them: fonts disagree about which set to draw as red, and some render the whole lot in the text colour, so a hand written with outlined suits may look inverted on someone else's device.
The full deck came much later. The Playing Cards block starting at U+1F0A0 arrived in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and contains all fifty two cards, plus knights, jokers and 🂠 the card back, each as a single character. 🃏 is the joker from that block. 🀄 is a different thing again: it is the red dragon tile from the Mahjong Tiles block, and it is the only tile of the set given an emoji presentation, which is why it shows in colour while every other mahjong tile renders as a flat drawing.
Font coverage is the practical limitation across this page. The chess pieces and the eight suits are ancient by computing standards and appear almost everywhere. The individual playing cards are far more recent and far less widely supported, so a post that spells out a poker hand character by character may reach a good share of readers as a row of empty rectangles. Check on a second device before relying on them.
Common questions
How do I write chess moves properly?
Use algebraic notation with plain letters rather than the piece characters, since that is what every engine, database and coaching site reads. The knight is written N because K is already the king. Save the glyphs for headings, diagrams and anywhere a human is reading rather than a program.
Why does the mahjong tile show in colour when the others do not?
Because 🀄, the red dragon, is the only character in the Mahjong Tiles block that was given an emoji presentation. The remaining tiles have text presentations and render as flat line drawings in your text colour. There is no way to make the rest match it.
Are ♠ and ♤ different cards?
No, they are the filled and hollow drawings of the same suit. Unicode encoded both because printed material has used both, particularly where a two colour press made a hollow spade cheaper. Fonts vary in which set they colour red, so pick one set and use it consistently.
Why do the individual playing cards show as empty boxes?
The Playing Cards block was only added in 2010, so many system fonts still do not cover it, and a missing glyph is drawn as a rectangle. The four suit symbols and the chess pieces date from the early 1990s and are far safer if you need something that displays everywhere.