Cross Symbols
The 28 cross characters of the Basic Multilingual Plane, grouped by shape rather than by name, each with its codepoint and official Unicode name.
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Four shapes, then everything else
Sorting the 28 by shape rather than by name puts nineteen of them into four groups.
Long-stemmed. U+271D LATIN CROSS has the crossbar above centre so the lower arm is the
longest of the four. U+271F OUTLINED LATIN CROSS is that outline empty, and U+271E SHADOWED WHITE LATIN CROSS is the outline with a
shadow offset behind it.
Equal-armed. U+271A HEAVY GREEK CROSS has four arms the same length. U+2719 OUTLINED GREEK CROSS is the
hollow version. U+271B OPEN CENTRE CROSS and U+271C HEAVY OPEN CENTRE CROSS leave the intersection open, at two stroke weights.
Extra bars. U+2626 ORTHODOX CROSS carries three horizontal bars with the lowest one
slanted; U+2628 CROSS OF LORRAINE carries two. U+2629 CROSS OF JERUSALEM, U+2670 WEST SYRIAC CROSS and U+2671 EAST SYRIAC CROSS complete the barred
group. Their names are traditional shape names rather than descriptions, and the Unicode code chart
shows one representative drawing of each; what a given font draws is its own decision.
Flared and diagonal. U+2720 MALTESE CROSS narrows towards the centre and its arm ends
are notched. U+2E50 CROSS PATTY WITH RIGHT CROSSBAR and U+2E51 CROSS PATTY WITH LEFT CROSSBAR flare outwards and are a mirrored pair, one with the
extra bar to each side. U+2613 SALTIRE is the diagonal cross — the X — with U+26DD SQUARED SALTIRE boxing it and
U+2B59 HEAVY CIRCLED SALTIRE circling it. That last one is the only circled cross in the set: an upright cross
inside a circle is not a character here.
The dagger is not a cross
U+2020 DAGGER and U+2021 DOUBLE DAGGER look like a cross and are not one, and the difference is not only
shape. They are punctuation, general category Po, so anything sorting by category files
them with commas and full stops rather than with symbols. By shape, a dagger’s crossbar sits high
on a shaft that tapers to a point below, where ✝ has a flat-ended arm. Neither is in this
set; this page covers the cross-shaped symbols only.
There is no inverted cross character
Searching every plane of Unicode for a character whose name contains CROSS together with
INVERTED, REVERSED, TURNED or UPSIDE returns nothing that is a cross. An upside-down cross on a
page is U+271D rotated by styling — a drawing instruction attached to the text, not a property
of the character. Copy it and you get the ordinary Latin cross back, because rotation was never in
the character to begin with.
Five that are not crosses
U+2A2F VECTOR OR CROSS PRODUCT is a maths operator, general category Sm, and carries operator spacing; it
belongs with the math symbols, not here. U+2573 BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT DIAGONAL CROSS comes from
the box-drawing
set, drawn to meet its neighbours exactly at the cell edges, so it looks wrong anywhere but inside
a grid — see line and box symbols. U+26D1 HELMET WITH WHITE CROSS is a helmet and
U+26E8 BLACK CROSS ON SHIELD is a shield; each carries a cross rather than being one. U+274C CROSS MARK and U+274E NEGATIVE SQUARED CROSS MARK
are marks in the tick-and-cross sense, and belong with
check mark symbols.
Width, if it has to line up
U+274C and U+274E are Wide: a full cell each. U+02DF, U+2573, U+26D1,
U+26DD, U+26E8 and U+2B59 are Ambiguous, so their cell count depends on the font
context. The remaining twenty are Neutral and stay narrow. Mixing the classes in a monospace
column is what makes the column jump. The wider reference is
symbols to copy and paste.