Symbols, Ready to Copy

Every character here is listed with its real name

A symbol reference is only useful if the character you copy is the character you meant. Each entry
on this site carries the codepoint in U+ notation and the official Unicode name, both
taken from the character database rather than typed out from memory. When two characters draw nearly
the same shape — and they often do — the number is what tells them apart.

Three wings

Music symbols is the smallest and the most surprising. Seven
characters, in one unbroken run from U+2669 to U+266F, are the entire set of music marks that survive
an ordinary paste. The treble clef is not among them, and there is no rest character either.

Maths and science symbols is nine sets: comparison signs, set
theory, logic, the general operator list, the Greek alphabet, superscripts and subscripts, the degree
sign and the infinity sign. Two of them are as small as five and nine characters, and that is not a
gap in the research.

The general reference is twenty sets: hearts, arrows, ticks
and crosses, stars, weather, planets, card suits, chess pieces, flowers, roman numerals, box drawing,
shapes, accented letters and the decorative dingbats.

Some of these sets are very small

Unicode’s symbol repertoire below U+FFFF is not large. There are eight heart characters. There are
four music notes. There are five copyright and trademark signs. A page here that lists four characters
is listing all four there are, and those are the ones worth having, because they are the ones that
arrive intact at the other end.

Why a character sometimes does not arrive

In UTF-8, everything up to U+FFFF encodes in three bytes or fewer and everything above it needs
four. A store or a form field can be built to accept a maximum of three bytes per character and still
be called UTF-8, so a four-byte character sent to one is refused, or the text is cut at that point.
Nothing warns you while you are typing. That is why the site keeps to characters below U+FFFF, and it
is the reason there is no treble clef anywhere on it —
sheet music symbols works the mechanism through in full.

Font coverage is a separate matter. Bytes can arrive perfectly and still show an empty box, if
whatever is drawing the text has no glyph for that codepoint. Encoding decides whether the character
survives the trip; the font decides whether you can see it once it lands.