Unicode Chess Symbols: Code Points, Names and Emoji Pawn

Unicode chess symbols are the characters the Unicode standard defines for chess pieces. Twelve of them cover the standard game, six white and six black, and a separate block holds additional pieces for variants. They let a page print a piece as text rather than as an image.

The twelve standard pieces

The standard pieces sit in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, in order: king, queen, rook, bishop, knight and pawn.

Piece	White	Black
King	U+2654	U+265A
Queen	U+2655	U+265B
Rook	U+2656	U+265C
Bishop	U+2657	U+265D
Knight	U+2658	U+265E
Pawn	U+2659	U+265F

Each name follows the pattern white chess king or black chess pawn. In HTML the decimal references run from 9812 for the white king to 9823 for the black pawn.

The emoji pawn

Unicode 11.0 added an emoji form of the black pawn, U+265F. As of Unicode 15.1 it is the only chess symbol that has an emoji presentation. Its default is text, and a variation selector chooses between the plain glyph and the emoji one. This is a known quirk when a pawn suddenly appears coloured on a phone.

The extra block

Unicode 12.0 allocated the Chess Symbols block, U+1FA00 to U+1FA6F, for extra pieces: fairy pieces, rotated and neutral pieces, knighted pieces, equihoppers and xiangqi pieces. In 2024 four shatranj pieces were provisionally assigned to U+1FA54 to U+1FA57, and the assignment was completed in Unicode 17.0. The xiangqi pieces in that block cover the game of Chinese chess.

Names and entities

Every standard piece has a Unicode name built from its colour, the words chess and the piece: white chess king at U+2654, white chess queen at U+2655, and so on through black chess pawn at U+265F. White always comes first in the sequence, so a black piece sits exactly six code points after its white counterpart: the black king is U+265A, six above the white king. In HTML a piece can be written as a decimal reference such as ♔ for the white king or as a hexadecimal one such as ♔. The decimal values run from 9812 to 9823, which is the range for all twelve characters.

Text and emoji presentation

Unicode treats most symbols as text by default and lets a variation selector override that choice. U+FE0E asks for the text presentation and U+FE0F for the emoji one. Only the black pawn, U+265F, has an emoji presentation in Unicode 15.1, which is why a lone pawn can turn into a coloured icon on a phone while the other eleven pieces stay monochrome. Appending U+FE0E after the pawn forces the plain glyph. A 2024 proposal asked for emoji versions of the other standard chess symbols, so the picture may change in later releases.

Counting what exists

Unicode 15.1 specifies 110 chess symbols across two blocks: the twelve in Miscellaneous Symbols and the rest in the Chess Symbols block that begins at U+1FA00. Within that second block the xiangqi pieces occupy U+1FA60 to U+1FA6D, fourteen code points, and the shatranj pieces at U+1FA54 to U+1FA57 were the late addition finished in Unicode 17.0. The block exists for fairy chess and variants: its pieces include neutral ones that belong to neither side, rotated ones, knighted ones and equihoppers, besides the xiangqi and shatranj sets. The twelve characters of the first block are enough for an ordinary game diagram.

Where the symbols are used

Figurine algebraic notation replaces the piece letter with its symbol, so the queen symbol followed by f1 stands for Qf1. Because the symbol replaces a letter, the notation does not depend on the piece initials of any one language. The symbols also let a game be drawn in a text-only environment such as a terminal, with the white and black pieces printed on a grid of characters. Where a font lacks the glyph, a browser may show a question mark or an empty box, so a design that depends on the diagram should name a font that carries the characters.

Fonts and figurine notation

A symbol shows only if the font in use has a glyph for it, which is why the same character can look different, or fall back to another font, from one device to the next. The Unicode names matter when searching: a character map lists them as white chess king or black chess knight, so those phrases find the right entry. In running text, a piece symbol is best treated as content, with the surrounding text still naming the piece, so that screen readers and search engines read it correctly. The choice of font changes the style only, not the code point. The examples on the reference page use DejaVu Sans, FreeSerif, Quivira and Pecita. The characters also make figurine notation possible, which replaces the letter of a piece with its symbol: the queen symbol plus f1 reads as Qf1. The article on Unicode Chess Symbols goes through the details, and the piece on Russian chess terms and notation explains why figurines help readers of books in other languages.

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