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 |
| > | 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 |
| × | 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 |
| ∆ | 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 |
| θ ϴ | 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 |
| φ ϕ | 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!