How to Type Emoji and Special Characters on Any Device
Writing & text · October 17, 2026 · 1 min read
Your keyboard has about a hundred keys, but there are many thousands of characters you might want: arrows, math signs, currency symbols, accented letters and emoji. You can reach all of them without memorizing codes.
Built-in shortcuts
- Windows: press the Windows key and the full stop (or semicolon) to open the emoji and symbol panel.
- Mac: press Control, Command and Space for the character viewer.
- iPhone and Android: switch to the emoji keyboard with the smiley key.
- On any device you can copy a character from a list and paste it where you need it.
The Emoji Picker and the Special Characters page let you search by name, click to copy, and build a message with several characters before copying it all.
What is Unicode?
Unicode is the standard that gives every character a number, called a code point. The euro sign has one, and so does every emoji. Fonts then draw the character. That is why the meaning of an emoji stays the same between devices, while its picture differs: each company designs its own.
HTML entities for web pages
In HTML, some characters have names written between an ampersand and a semicolon. For example © shows a copyright sign, → an arrow and € the euro sign. You can also use the code point number. Four characters must be escaped in page text because HTML uses them for itself: the less-than sign, the greater-than sign, the ampersand and the quotation mark. The HTML Entity Encoder converts text both ways.
When characters go wrong
- A box or question mark means the font has no picture for that character.
- Garbled letters like é usually mean text was read with the wrong encoding. Use UTF-8 everywhere.
- Older MySQL setups need the utf8mb4 setting to store emoji.
- Emoji look different on every platform, so check an important message on a second device.