Unicode Character Map

What a character map is for

Your keyboard shows roughly a hundred characters, but the text you type can contain hundreds of thousands. A character map bridges that gap: it lets you find and copy symbols that have no key — an em dash, a degree sign, a Greek letter, an arrow, a currency symbol, an emoji — and paste them anywhere that accepts text. This tool presents a curated set of around 300 of the most useful characters, grouped into Emoji, Symbols, Math, Arrows, Currency, and accented Letters, each searchable by name or by its Unicode code point.

Unicode, code points, and what "U+2665" means

Every character lives in Unicode, the universal catalogue that assigns each one a unique number called a code point. Code points are written as U+ followed by a hexadecimal number. The heart symbol ♥ is U+2665; the Greek small letter pi π is U+03C0; the euro sign € is U+20AC. This tool computes the code point of each character with the browser's codePointAt function and displays it under the glyph, padded to at least four hex digits. That label is not decoration — it is the character's permanent, language-independent identity, the thing you search for in documentation or quote in a bug report.

The two forms the tool reveals

Hover any character and the tooltip shows three things: its official Unicode name, its U+ code point, and its HTML numeric entity. The entity is the code point written in a form that web pages understand directly. The heart's entity is ♥ — that is the decimal value of U+2665 (9829) wrapped in &#...;. Pasting that entity into HTML renders the same ♥, which is invaluable when you cannot rely on the file's text encoding to carry an exotic character safely.

How searching works

The search box matches three different ways at once, so you can find a character however you think of it. Type a word and it matches the character's Unicode name — searching heart surfaces ♥ and 🖤. Paste the character itself and it matches exactly. Or type a code point — 2665, or U+2665 — and the tool strips the U+ prefix and matches against the hex code. That last route is the fastest way to jump to a specific character you already know the number for.

A worked example

Say you are writing about temperature and need the degree sign. Type degree in the search box. The grid filters to ° (DEGREE SIGN, U+00B0). Click it and it is copied to your clipboard — a small "Copied!" toast confirms it — ready to paste into 23°C. Need the multiplication sign for a real "times" symbol instead of a letter x? Switch to the Math or Symbols tab, or search multiplication, and copy × (U+00D7). Building a price label in another currency? The Currency tab holds €, £, ¥, ₩, ₿, ₹ and more, each one click away.

Why use the real character instead of a look-alike

• Typography. A true multiplication sign × is centred and proportioned for numbers; the letter x is not. A real em dash — reads as punctuation; two hyphens do not.
• Accessibility. Screen readers announce the genuine character by its Unicode name, so ° is read as "degrees" rather than skipped.
• Searchability and data. A proper ñ or é makes a name searchable and sortable correctly, where a plain n or e loses information.
• Cross-platform fidelity. Because the character is identified by code point, it renders the same on every system that has a font for it.

Tips and pitfalls

• Emoji can vary by device. The code point is fixed, but each platform draws its own picture, so 😀 looks slightly different on Apple, Google, and Microsoft systems. The meaning is constant; the artwork is not.
• Some glyphs are combinations. A few symbols (like ❤️) are a base character plus an invisible variation selector that tells the system to render it in colour. Copying the whole cell preserves that, so paste it as one unit rather than retyping.
• Fonts matter. If a copied character shows as an empty box where you paste it, the destination font lacks that glyph — the character is correct, the font just cannot draw it.
• HTML entities beat raw glyphs in some contexts. If you are pasting into source code whose encoding you do not control, the numeric entity from the tooltip is the safest way to guarantee the right symbol appears.

Copying happens through your browser's clipboard API; nothing you search or copy leaves your device.