Unicode Chess Symbols: Code Points, Fonts and Rendering

The twelve standard pieces

Unicode reserves twelve characters for the ordinary chess pieces, and they sit in the Miscellaneous Symbols block. The white set runs from U+2654 to U+2659 and the black set from U+265A to U+265F, in the same order each time: king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, 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

In HTML the same characters can be written as numeric references from ♔ to ♟, or in hexadecimal from ♔ to ♟. A page that declares UTF-8 can simply contain the characters themselves.

Each glyph is named for its colour, so a page set in light text on a dark background needs a check that the “white” set still reads as white and the “black” set as black.

The extended block from Unicode 12

The twelve characters are no longer the whole story. Unicode 12.0 added a Chess Symbols block at U+1FA00 to U+1FA6F. It was allocated for pieces that the older block could not express: fairy chess pieces, rotated pieces, neutral pieces that belong to neither side, knighted pieces, equihoppers and the pieces of xiangqi. The last row of the block holds fourteen symbols.

Four shatranj pieces were provisionally assigned at U+1FA54 to U+1FA57 in 2024, and the Wikipedia article reports that this was completed in Unicode 17.0. Counting both blocks together, Unicode 15.1 specifies 110 chess piece symbols.

The emoji pawn

One of the twelve characters behaves differently from the rest. Unicode 11.0 gave the black pawn, U+265F, an emoji presentation, and as of Unicode 15.1 it is the only chess symbol that has one. Depending on the software, it can therefore appear as a coloured emoji where the rest of the black set appears as plain text glyphs.

Two variation selectors control which form is shown. Following the pawn with VS15 asks for the text form, and following it with VS16 asks for the emoji form. A table of pieces that must look consistent should add VS15 after every black pawn. A proposal from 2024 asked for emoji versions of the other standard chess symbols as well, so the list of exceptions may change.

Fonts

A character only displays if some font on the reader’s device contains a glyph for it. Without one, the reader sees a box, a question mark or a substitute symbol. The Wikipedia article illustrates the symbols in four fonts, DejaVu Sans, FreeSerif, Quivira and Pecita, but it does not state how completely each font covers the block, so a page that depends on the symbols should be tested on the actual devices of its readers instead of assumed to work.

Two practical habits follow. The first is to list a font that is known to carry the symbols near the front of the CSS font stack, then check the result in a desktop browser and on a phone. The second is to keep a plain-letter version of the move text available wherever the symbols could fail to display, so that a missing glyph never hides the notation.

Figurine notation

The most common reason to use the symbols is figurine algebraic notation. Instead of a letter for the piece, the printed move carries its picture, so the knight move Nc6 becomes the knight symbol followed by c6. Chess Informant pioneered the style, and modern literature generally uses it because a reader does not need to know which letter a given language assigns to a piece. The Miscellaneous Symbols block provides the glyphs needed for it.

Readers working through books in another language benefit because the figurine removes the translation of piece letters. For how language-specific letters differ, see the article on Russian chess terms and notation. The wider story of chess on computers is collected in the computer chess hub, and the broader background of the game is in the chess history section.

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