Symbol Names

This is a simple quick-reference page that lists all the symbols and their names. Some symbols
have multiple names, and so they're listed with commas in between.

The symbols on your keyboard are included first, and then they are followed my symbols that are
commonly used in mathematics and other field. The symbols are roughly sorted by their usage
frequency, so you should be able to quickly find the name of the symbol that you're interested in.

Symbol Names

& Ampersand, And

' Apostrophe, Single quote

* Asterisk, Multiply

@ At

` Backtick, Backquote, Grave accent

\ Back slash

/ Forward slash

# Hash, Number sign, Pound, Sharp

^ Carat, Circumflex accent

~ Tilde

- Hyphen, Minus

: Colon

; Semi-colon

( Opening/Left parenthesis

) Closing/Right parenthesis

{ Opening/Left curly brace/bracket

} Closing/Right curly brace/bracket

[ Opening/Left square brace/bracket

] Closing/Right square brace/bracket

| Vertical bar/pipe
Symbol Names

> Greater-than

< Less-than

% Percent

+ Plus

_ Underscore, Low line

! Exclamation mark

? Question mark

" Quotation mark, Double quotes

, Comma

. Period, Full stop, Dot

«» Double-angle quotation marks

£ Pound

¦ Broken bar

µ Micro, Greek letter mu

± Plus-or-minus

® Registered

™ Trademark

© Copyright

¶ Pilcrow

§ Section

¨ Diaeresis

¿ Inverted question mark

¡ Inverted exclamation mark

¥ Yen

¢ Cent

¤ Currency
Symbol Names

× Multiplication, Cartesian product

÷ Division

° Degrees

¯ Macron

⊕ XOR, Exclusive or

∥ Or, Logical or

∨ Or, Logical or

∧ And, logical and

˜ Not, Logical complement

¬ Not, Logical complement

⇔ Material equivalence, If and only if, iff, Means the same as

≡ Is identical to, Is defined as

≢ Not identical to

⇒ Implies

→ Implies

⊃ Superset, Implies

⊇ Strict superset

∀ For all

∃ There exists

∄ There does not exist

⋂ Intersection

⋃ Union

⊆ Subset

⊂ Strict subset, Proper subset

⊄ Not subset
Symbol Names

∆ Delta, Change, Symmetric difference

∈ Element of, Belongs to

∉ Not element of

Ø Empty set, Zero

Ʃ⅀ Sum, Latin letter esh

∏ Product, capital pi

α Greek letter alpha

β Greek letter beta

γ Greek letter gamma

δ Greek letter delta

ε Greek letter epsilon

ζ Greek letter zeta

η Greek letter eta

θϴ Greek letter theta

ι Greek letter iota

κ Greek letter kappa

λ Greek letter lambda

μ Greek letter mu

ν Greek letter nu

ξ Greek letter xi

ο Greek letter omicron

π Greek letter pi

ρ Greek letter rho

ς Greek letter final sigma

σ Greek letter sigma

τ Greek letter tau

υ Greek letter upsilon

φϕ Greek letter phi

χ Greek letter chi

ψ Greek letter psi

ω Greek letter omega

‼ Double exclamation mark

′ Prime

″ Double prime

– En dash

— Em dash

ª Feminine ordinal indicator

º Masculine ordinal indicator

• Bullet

∞ Infinity

∫ Integral

∇ Nabla

… Ellipsis

⟛ Semantically equivalent

♠ Spade

♣ Club

♥ Heart

♦ Diamond

As you've probably noticed, the list contains basically all the symbols other than the letters and
numbers on the average English keyboard. It also contains named symbols that are only on
specific variants of the QWERTY keyboard (such as £, which doesn't occur on US keyboards)

Names of symbols are often unusually hard to find, because (at least as of writing), Google ignores
the symbols in your search query. I imagine this is a holdover from the early days of search engines
where text corpora where too large to handle in their raw form, and so words were aggressively
"stemmed" and tokenized to make the datasets computationally tractable. So what this means is
that if you type "name of symbol ^", then Google only sees name of symbol - it completely misses
the main part of your query! Hopefully Google will fix this up at some point, but rather than hold my
breath, I figured I'd create a neat little "quick reference" site in case it's handy for others.

But to make matters worse, sometimes you don't even have a copy of the symbol to paste it into
Google (for example, you just saw your Math professor write it on the whiteboard). So here's a trick
to help you if you're in that situation, or if you just can't find the symbol that you're after on this
page: Visit ShapeCatcher.com, and simply draw your symbol onto the input area provided. It'll give
you a bunch of symbols on a search result page, and hopefully that helps you find the name of the
symbols that you're thinking of.

If Shape Catcher doesn't help, you can also use a simular function in Google Docs. Just click the
"insert" menu, and then click "Special Characters" in the drop-down menu that appears. A box like
this will appear:

You can then draw your symbol and then hover over the search results to find out their names.

If people find this site useful, I think I'll create a bunch of different "quick-references" for various
categories of symbols (e.g. keyboard symbols, math symbols, set theory symbols, etc.). I think I'll
also add data on the specific uses-cases of each symbol, and build up a bit of a database of the
most commonly used Unicode symbols. In any case, I hope you do find this site useful - thanks for
stopping by!