Random Symbol Generator

The Random Symbol Generator shows you one Unicode character at a time. Press the button and a card appears with the symbol in large type, a label underneath, and a copy icon that puts the character on your clipboard so you can paste it into a username, a document or a design file. The pool is about 2,350 characters, and roughly half of it is Egyptian hieroglyphs.

It is a browsing tool more than a lookup tool. If you know the symbol you want, a Unicode search is faster. If you want to stumble on something you didn't know existed, this is the page.

What comes out

Every result is a single real character, not an image, so it will paste anywhere text goes. The label is a proper name for the curated part of the list (Peace Symbol, Euro Sign, Greek Small Letter Alpha, White Chess Queen, Face with Tears of Joy) and a block-plus-code-point label for the bulk of it (Egyptian Hieroglyph O050, Miscellaneous Symbol 0x2609, Extended ASCII 161, Unicode 970). There are no filters and no batch mode; one press, one symbol.

One thing to know before you start pressing: whether a character displays depends on the fonts installed on your device. Currency signs, Greek letters, arrows, card suits and emoji render everywhere. Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Ancient Symbols block need a font that covers them (Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs, for example), and on many phones they show as an empty box or a question mark. The copy button still works; the character is real even when your screen can't draw it.

What's in the pool

So the honest expectation is: about one press in two lands on a hieroglyph, one in three on a Greek or Cyrillic letter, and the remaining one in six on the kind of symbol most people are picturing when they search for a symbol generator (a currency sign, a math operator, a chess piece, a star, a heart).

Ways people use it

• Decorating a username or bio. Press until something like ☾, ♆ or ✵ turns up, copy it, paste it next to your name. The Random Font Generator and Pls Donate Text Generator do the same job for whole words.
• Picking a glyph for a logo or icon sketch. A random hieroglyph or ancient symbol is a decent starting shape to trace over.
• Worldbuilding scripts. Fantasy writers use runs of hieroglyphs and Coptic letters as the written language of an invented culture.
• Testing text rendering. If you build software, a stream of characters from the astral planes (anything above U+FFFF, which includes every hieroglyph here) is a good way to find fields that truncate or garble them.
• Learning what Unicode contains. Most people have never seen the Ancient Symbols block. Now you have.

Symbols, emoji and Unicode code points

Everything on this page is a Unicode character. Unicode assigns each character a number (its code point), and the labels on the generic entries here are that number in hexadecimal (0x2609) or decimal (970). Fonts then supply the drawing. Emoji are just characters in the Supplemental Symbols blocks that fonts happen to render in color, which is why a handful of faces sit in this list alongside the chess pieces; if emoji are what you're after, the Random Emoji Generator is all emoji, all the time. For the raw code-point angle, the Random Unicode Generator picks characters by number rather than from a curated pool, and the ASCII Art Generator goes the other way, building pictures out of plain keyboard characters.

See all word & language generators for the rest of the text tools on the site.