zodiac symbols
Zodiac and planet symbols
The twelve signs, the planets, and the glyphs used in birth charts.
43 symbols · tap any one to copy
Zodiac & planets
Star-sign glyphs and planetary symbols for astrology posts, birth-chart notes, TikTok bios and dating profiles that lead with a sun sign.
The twelve sign glyphs run in a tidy sequence from U+2648 to U+2653, in the traditional order beginning with Aries, and they were encoded in the early 1990s for a reason that has nothing to do with social media. Astronomical and astrological notation appears throughout historical and scientific literature, and scholars digitising those texts needed the symbols to exist as characters rather than as pictures. The horoscope bio came along a couple of decades later and inherited a set that was already there.
The planetary glyphs sit just before them, from U+263F to U+2647, and they carry the same scholarly ancestry. ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄ ♅ ♆ ♇ are Mercury through Pluto, and Pluto is still in the standard despite its 2006 reclassification as a dwarf planet, because Unicode does not remove characters once encoded. Stability is the point: a document written in 1995 has to keep rendering in 2035.
Two of those glyphs lead double lives. ♀ and ♂ are Venus and Mars in astronomy and the female and male signs in biology, on forms, and in countless diagrams, and there is no separate character for each meaning. Context alone decides. It is a good illustration of a general Unicode principle: characters encode shapes with a history, not meanings, and the same shape used for two purposes gets encoded once.
The smaller glyphs are the ones serious chart readers recognise. ⚳ ⚴ ⚵ ⚶ are Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta, the four largest asteroids, and ⚷ is Chiron. ☊ and ☋ are the ascending and descending lunar nodes, the points where the moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic. Most of these arrived in Unicode 4.1 in 2005, considerably later than the signs themselves, which is why they occasionally fail to render on hardware that handles the twelve signs fine.
The rendering surprise on this page is colour. The twelve zodiac signs and ⛎ have emoji presentations defined, so on a phone they very often arrive as coloured tiles with a purple background rather than as the thin scholarly line drawings you saw when you copied them. If you want the flat version, follow the character with the text variation selector U+FE0E, where the platform supports it. The sun, moon and node glyphs have no emoji form and stay as text everywhere, which makes them the more reliable choice for a design that has to look consistent.
Common questions
Why does my star sign symbol turn into a coloured tile?
Because the twelve zodiac signs have an emoji presentation as well as a text one, and most phones default to the emoji drawing. Following the character with the text variation selector U+FE0E requests the plain line version, though support for that request varies between apps.
Is ⛎ Ophiuchus a real thirteenth sign?
It is a real constellation that the sun passes through, and Unicode encodes a symbol for it, but it is not part of the traditional twelve sign zodiac used in Western astrology. The character exists because the symbol appears in astronomical writing, not because the standard takes a position on astrology.
What are ⚳ ⚴ ⚵ ⚶ and ⚷?
They are the glyphs for Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta, the four largest asteroids, plus Chiron. Modern natal chart software frequently plots them alongside the planets. They were added to Unicode later than the main signs, so older devices are more likely to show them as empty boxes.
Why is Pluto still included if it is not a planet?
Because Unicode never removes a character once it has been encoded. Documents, databases and archives written years ago must keep rendering identically forever, so the glyph stays regardless of what astronomers decide about the object it represents. The character encodes the symbol, not the scientific classification.