/01 Finding the character you actually mean
Typing an em dash, a proper minus sign, a non-breaking space or an arrow usually means hunting through a character map or copying something questionable off a web page. This browser lets you search Unicode by name or code point and copy the exact character you want.
Search for what the character is called — arrow, dagger, ellipsis, degree — rather than trying to remember its code point.
/02 Characters that look alike but are not
A hyphen, en dash, em dash and minus sign are four different code points that render similarly and behave completely differently in search, sorting and line breaking. The same goes for straight and curly quotes, and for the several space characters of varying width.
Picking the right one matters for text that gets indexed, compared or read aloud by a screen reader. Each result here shows its name and code point so you can confirm you have the correct character before pasting it.
/03 What Unicode characters are
Unicode is the standard that gives every character a unique number, called a code point, written as U+ followed by hexadecimal digits. The letter A is U+0041, the Indian rupee sign is U+20B9 and the check mark is U+2713. As of Unicode 17.0 the standard defines just under 160,000 characters, covering the world's scripts, symbols, technical marks and emoji.
The code point is the same on every device, but how a character looks depends on the font drawing it. That is why an emoji can appear differently on an iPhone and a Windows PC, and why a rare symbol shows as an empty box when no installed font includes it.
This browser groups characters into practical sets: arrows, box drawing, currency, Cyrillic, dingbats, emoji, geometric shapes, Greek, basic and extended Latin, maths operators, punctuation and symbols. Search by name or code point and click any character to copy it.
/04 Special characters worth knowing
A handful of characters come up constantly. The non-breaking space, U+00A0, keeps a number and its unit together on one line. The multiplication sign ×, U+00D7, looks far better in dimensions than a letter x. The degree sign °, U+00B0, is often faked with a superscript o. The bullet •, U+2022, and the right arrow →, U+2192, tidy up plain text lists. The rupee sign ₹, U+20B9, is missing from many older keyboard layouts.
Box drawing characters let you draw tables and diagrams in plain text, code comments and terminal output that line up perfectly in a monospaced font.