The stories behind the symbols
Every character on this site has a technical reference. These are the ones that also have a story — origins, double meanings, typographic feuds and platform quirks.
— Em Dash Writers get attached to the em dash. It's the long horizontal stroke that opens a sentence up — like this — to drop in an aside, mark an abrupt turn, or land a final clause with more force than a…÷ Division Sign The division sign has a double life, and the older half is stranger than the arithmetic. Long before it meant "divide," the obelus — a horizontal line, sometimes flanked by dots — was an editorial…® Registered Sign Registered Trade Mark Sign The circled R is a legal claim, and using it wrongly can cost you. In the United States it may only sit beside a trademark that has actually been registered with the federal trademark office; putting…© Copyright Sign There's a good chance you don't legally need this symbol — and that's the interesting part. When the United States overhauled its law to join the Berne Convention, effective 1989, the copyright…× Multiplication Sign The little cross for multiplication has a birthday and an author. William Oughtred, an English clergyman and mathematician, used it in his 1631 textbook "Clavis Mathematicae," and from there it…¥ Yen Sign The yen sign hides a genuinely surprising piece of computing trivia. In Japanese character encodings — Shift-JIS and the Windows code page built on it — the byte value that Western systems use for…– En Dash Narrower than the em dash and wider than a hyphen, the en dash earns its keep in one humble job: showing a span. Pages 10–24, the years 1939–45, Monday–Friday, a London–Paris train — in each case it…‒ Figure Dash Here's a dash almost nobody knows they've needed. The figure dash is cut to exactly the width of a single digit in whatever typeface you're setting, and it exists for one reason: to sit among numbers…£ Pound Sign The pound sign started life as a letter. It's a capital L, written in the ornate hand of old accountants and crossed by one or two horizontal bars to show it's an abbreviation — the L standing for…¢ Cent Sign A small casualty of computing history, the cent sign once had its own typewriter key, sitting comfortably beside the numbers, because writing prices in cents was everyday work. Then ASCII — the…$ Dollar Sign The favourite story about the dollar sign — that it's a U stacked on an S for "United States" — is almost certainly folklore, appealing and false. The likeliest explanation, traced by the historian…⭐ Star This is the star that means "rate it." Officially "White Medium Star," it's the single glyph doing duty behind five-star reviews, favourited items, and the little burst you tap to bookmark something…★ Black Star Before there was a star emoji, there was this: a solid black five-pointed star that has lived in fonts for decades as a typographic ornament. It comes as a matched pair with its hollow twin, the…❤️🔥 Heart On Fire Technically, this is two emoji wearing one costume. Heart on Fire is a ZWJ sequence — a red heart and a flame joined by an invisible "zero-width joiner" character that tells your device to fuse them…🖤 Black Heart A relative newcomer, the black heart only entered Unicode in 2016 — decades after the red one — arriving to fill a gap the coloured hearts had left open: a heart for the darker, cooler end of the…💛 Yellow Heart On Snapchat, the yellow heart means something exact: it's the badge the app shows when you and another person are each other's number-one best friend, the top of a small hierarchy of friendship emoji…💙 Blue Heart Cool where the red heart is warm, the blue heart tends to get sent when the feeling is steady rather than fiery: loyalty, trust, calm, the kind of affection that doesn't need to announce itself. Blue…❤️ Red Heart Long before phones had emoji keyboards, this shape already existed in Unicode as U+2764, blandly named "Heavy Black Heart" — a printer's dingbat from 1993, meant to be inked in black like any other…💜 Purple Heart Among K-pop fans, the purple heart isn't a mood — it's practically a password. In November 2016 the BTS member V improvised the phrase "I purple you" at a fan event, explaining that purple, the last…💔 Broken Heart Split down the middle by a jagged line, this is one of the oldest visual metaphors in the emoji set — a heart drawn as if it had physically cracked in two. The convention long predates computers…