Chess Symbols

to copy and paste

Chess symbols and Unicode

As long as there’s been computers, there’s been computer chess. The cross over between computer and chess nerds is big.

Typefaces with chess sumbols existed long before digital type. chess nerds used these fonts in illustrations and shorthand notation of chess games.

So it’s not surprising that Unicode added chess symbols shortly after it was founded.

Unicode Chess symbols also allow coders to create very small chess programs. Saving memory used to store the graphics for each piece.

Toledo Nano Chess

Toledo Nano Chess is one example of these tiny chess program. This one was written in javascript in only 2.2kb by Óscar Toledo G.

It’s been changed slightly to work with the javascript framework used by this website. You can find the original here

Over the years, Unicode added other game symbols including playing cards 🂡, dice ⚅, dominos 🁌, Mahjong 🀅, Shogi ☖, Draughts ⛀, and Go ⚆.

Alternative Chess Symbols

There are hundreds of variations on chess and chess puzzles. Many of these variation use special chess symbols (sometimes a salt shaker 🧂). To render them requires installing a font designed for these pieces. So they’ve they’ve been ommited here.

You can read more about them on wikipedia (of course).

How to use Unicode Chess Symbols

To use these symbols, simply copy them to your clipboard, and paste them as you would any text online.