punctuation symbols
Punctuation and divider symbols
Bullets and rules for platforms that strip your formatting.
50 symbols · tap any one to copy
Punctuation & dividers
Bullet points and horizontal rules for platforms that strip formatting — LinkedIn posts, Instagram bios, plain-text emails and forum signatures.
Half of this page exists because social platforms remove formatting. There is no way to make a real bulleted list in an Instagram bio or a LinkedIn post, so people build one out of characters instead, and the General Punctuation block supplies the parts: • the standard bullet, ◦ its hollow counterpart for a second level, ‣ the triangular bullet and ⁃ the hyphen bullet, each encoded for exactly this job in documents that could not rely on list markup.
Some of the marks here have better stories than their appearance suggests. ‽ is the interrobang, invented in 1962 by an American advertising executive called Martin Speckter who thought a question and an exclamation deserved one glyph rather than two. ⁂ is the asterism, three asterisks arranged in a triangle, once used to mark a break between passages. ※ is the Japanese kome mark, named after the character for rice, and it introduces a note or a caveat in Japanese text much as an asterisk does in English.
The daggers work by convention rather than by rule. † and ‡ are footnote markers, and traditional typesetting uses them in a fixed order after the asterisk, so a page runs asterisk, dagger, double dagger, then section sign. Knowing the sequence is what separates footnotes that look typeset from footnotes that look decorated.
The ellipsis is worth using properly. … is one character rather than three full stops, and that matters practically: it will never break across a line, it takes the spacing its designer intended instead of whatever three periods happen to produce, and search engines treat the two forms as different strings. ‥ is its two dot cousin, borrowed from CJK typesetting where leader dots fill space in a table of contents.
Finally, the long rules. ─ ━ ═ ┄ ┅ are box drawing characters, and they came into Unicode from IBM code page 437, the character set that let DOS programs draw frames and menus on a text screen. They were designed to connect edge to edge in a monospaced font, which is why they make a perfect unbroken line in a terminal and a dotted, gappy one in the proportional font of a social media bio. If your divider looks like it has holes in it, that is why, and repeating ⸻ or a run of the same character usually looks cleaner on the web.
Common questions
How do I make a divider line that does not look broken?
Box drawing characters were designed for monospaced terminals and leave visible gaps in the proportional fonts used by most apps. Either repeat a single character consistently, or use the long horizontal bar ⸻ which is drawn as one wide stroke. Mixing several dash characters is what produces the ragged look.
Is … better than typing three full stops?
Usually yes. The single ellipsis character keeps its own spacing, never splits across two lines, and is what typesetting conventions expect. The one place to prefer three periods is in code or in a search box, where systems may treat the single character as a different string entirely.
What is the ※ symbol used for?
It is the kome mark from Japanese typography, used to introduce a note, a caveat or a piece of small print, roughly where English would use an asterisk. It has no meaning in English text, so outside Japanese writing it functions purely as an eye-catching bullet.
Do bullet characters work as a real list for screen readers?
No, and it is the trade-off worth knowing. A real list has structure that assistive technology can announce, such as how many items it contains. A line starting with a bullet character is just a paragraph beginning with a symbol, which some screen readers announce as its full Unicode name. Use real lists wherever the platform allows them.