Chess Symbols

The twelve, in order

They run without a gap from U+2654 to U+265F: six named WHITE — king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, pawn — then the same six named BLACK in the same order. All twelve are general category So and East Asian width N, so each takes one cell in a fixed-width column, and nothing that sorts by category will treat them as letters or digits.

A search of character names across this plane for the word CHESS returns exactly these twelve. The grid is not a selection from a larger set; it is the set.

White and black describe the fill, not the colour

In a Unicode name, WHITE means the glyph is drawn hollow and BLACK means it is drawn solid. Neither carries a colour of its own — both are painted in whatever colour the surrounding text is. Put U+265A BLACK CHESS KING on a dark background and you get a solid dark shape on dark, while U+2654 WHITE CHESS KING stays readable as an outline. That is the reverse of what the names suggest. If a diagram needs the two sides to read correctly, the contrast has to come from the page, not from the character.

Figurine notation is what the set is for

Standard algebraic notation is written in ASCII: files a to h, ranks 1 to 8, x for a capture, + for check. None of it needs a special character. Figurine notation is the variant that replaces the piece letter with the piece itself, so a knight move is written with U+2658 or U+265E where a letter would otherwise go. The reason it exists is mechanical rather than decorative: the letter standing for a piece changes with the language of the writer, and the glyph does not.

What happens to them in a field

• Each is three bytes in UTF-8. A column that accepts up to three-byte sequences stores all twelve; none of them needs four.
• A field that strips non-ASCII removes them without a trace. A move written in figurine notation then reads as a bare square — the piece is gone and nothing marks where it was.
• A search for a move typed with letters will not find the same move typed with pieces. They are different characters and nothing normalises one into the other.
• A font with no coverage in this range shows a box. The text is intact; only the drawing is missing.

Nearby

The card suits begin immediately after the pawns, at U+2660, and are on card suit symbols. The hollow-and-solid naming runs through the whole site — flower symbols has a black florette and a white one that are the same drawing twice. Every general set is indexed on symbols to copy and paste.