Chess symbols in Unicode

Refer to caption

Font depictions of Unicode chess symbols (in the same order as the table): DejaVu Sans, FreeSerif, Quivira, Pecita.

A screenshot of the GNU Chess program in graphic mode showing the chessboard with Unicode characters.

GNU Chess using Unicode chess characters to display a chess board in the terminal.

Unicode has text representations of chess pieces. These allow to produce the symbols using plain text without the need of a graphics interface. The inclusion of the chess symbols enables the use of figurine algebraic notation, which replaces the letter that stands for a piece by its symbol, e.g. ♛f1 instead of Qf1. This also allows the play of chess games in text-only environments, such as the terminal.

Unicode blocks

Unicode 15.1 specifies a total of 110 spread across two blocks. The standard set of chess pieces—king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, or pawn, with white and black variants—were included in the block Miscellaneous Symbols. In Unicode 12.0, the Chess Symbols block (U+1FA00–U+1FA6F) was allocated for inclusion of extra chess piece representations. This includes fairy chess pieces, such as rotated pieces, neutral (neither white nor black) pieces, knighted pieces, equihoppers, as well as xiangqi pieces.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2024, four shatranj pieces were provisionally assigned for a future version in the range U+1FA54–U+1FA57.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> This was completed in Unicode 17.0.

Miscellaneous symbols

Chess Symbols
Template:Nobold

Name	Symbol	Code point	HTML (decimal)	HTML (hex)
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+2654	♔	♔
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+2655	♕	♕
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+2656	♖	♖
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+2657	♗	♗
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+2658	♘	♘
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+2659	♙	♙
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+265A	♚	♚
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+265B	♛	♛
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+265C	♜	♜
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+265D	♝	♝
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+265E	♞	♞
Template:Smallcaps	Template:Huge	U+265F	♟	♟

Emoji

In Unicode 11.0, an emojified representation of the character Template:Unichar was added.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> As of Unicode 15.1, only this character has an emoji version. In 2024, a proposal was submitted to include emoji versions of the other standard chess symbols.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Emoji variation sequences

U+	265F
default presentation	text
base code point	♟
base+VS15 (text)	Template:Emoji presentation
base+VS16 (emoji)	Template:Emoji presentation