You've seen Instagram bios and TikTok names written in 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓲𝓿𝓮, 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝 or 🅑🅤🅑🅑🅛🅔 letters. Apps don't let you choose a font, so how do people do it? The trick is Unicode, and it takes seconds once you know how.
How “fancy fonts” work
Unicode is the standard that lets every device show every language. Among its more than 150,000 characters are complete alphabets made for maths and other special uses, which happen to look like styled fonts: bold, italic, script, gothic, double-struck, circled letters and more. A fancy font generator swaps each normal letter for its look-alike. The result is ordinary text, so it can be pasted anywhere, without installing anything.
How to use them
- Type your text into the fancy text generator.
- Scroll through the styles and click one to copy it.
- Paste it into your bio, name, caption, comment or message.
Where they work
- Instagram: bio, name, captions, comments and Stories. The bio limit is 150 characters, and some fancy letters count as two.
- TikTok: bio, captions and comments; usernames only allow plain letters, numbers, underscores and full stops.
- X, Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Discord, YouTube comments: almost everywhere you can type.
- Games: many accept them in player names, some don't. Try a simple style like bold first.
Things to know
Some devices show boxes
Bold, italic, script and bubble letters work on almost every phone. Rarer styles, like small caps or superscript, may be missing a letter or two on older devices, which then show an empty box. Look at your profile on another phone to check.
Search won't find it
To a computer, 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨 isn't the word “hello”, so people searching for it won't find your styled words. Keep the words you want to be found by, such as your name and what you do, in normal text.
Screen readers struggle
People who use screen readers may hear each letter read out as a maths symbol, or nothing at all. Use fancy text for a short decoration, like your name or a title, not for whole sentences or important information.
More ideas
- Add symbols around your name: ꧁ name ꧂, ★彡 name 彡★ or 『name』.
- Flip text for fun with the upside-down text generator.
- Keep empty lines in your bio with an invisible character, because Instagram sometimes removes them.