62 characters · free to copy
Card suit symbols that stay text
Unicode carries the four card suits twice — once filled and once outlined — plus a complete 52-card deck where every single card has its own character. All of it is text, so it takes your font, your size and your colour. Copy any character below; each one is listed with its Unicode name and code point, and the suits that some platforms recolour on their own are flagged so you can stop them.
Filled suits
The solid set — the default choice for scoreboards, poker notation and card-game UI.
Outlined suits
The hollow set. Pairs with the filled suits to show two players, or two states, without using colour.
Spades — full rank
Every spade from ace to king as a single character (U+1F0A1–U+1F0AE).
Hearts — full rank
Ace through king of hearts (U+1F0B1–U+1F0BE).
Diamonds — full rank
Ace through king of diamonds (U+1F0C1–U+1F0CE).
Clubs — full rank
Ace through king of clubs (U+1F0D1–U+1F0DE), plus the jokers and the face-down card.
Click any character to copy it. Nothing is downloaded — these are text characters, not images.
Unicode blocks
- U+2660–U+2667 Miscellaneous Symbols
- U+1F0A0–U+1F0F5 Playing Cards
How to use Card Suit Symbols
Copy the suit or the card
Click any character to copy it. The four suits are single characters; so is every individual card, which means a whole hand fits in five keystrokes of text.
Force the text form if it arrives coloured
Add the invisible variation selector U+FE0E straight after ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ to lock the monochrome glyph. Without it, some platforms swap in a red-and-black emoji you cannot restyle.
Pair filled with outlined instead of red with black
Using ♠ against ♤ separates two players by shape rather than colour, so the distinction survives greyscale printing and colour-blind vision.
Lay out a hand in monospace
In a monospaced font every card occupies the same cell, so rows line up without tables or images. That is how the card layouts on this site are built.
About Card Suit Symbols
The four suits at U+2660 to U+2667 are among the oldest symbols in Unicode, inherited from the typewriter and terminal character sets that preceded it. Each suit exists twice: a filled version and an outlined version. That doubling is unusually useful, because it lets you distinguish two sides by shape rather than by colour — a hand written as ♠♥ against ♤♡ still reads correctly in a black-and-white printout or to a colour-blind player.
A far less known corner of Unicode is the Playing Cards block at U+1F0A0, which encodes the entire 52-card deck plus jokers and a face-down card, one character each. The ace of spades is not a composed sequence; it is the single code point U+1F0A1. A five-card poker hand is therefore five characters of plain text — no images, no sprite sheet, no markup. Font support is decent on desktop and mixed on mobile, so test before shipping a deck to a phone audience.
Hearts and diamonds carry the same dual-presentation problem as the black chess pawn. Because ♥ is also used as an emoji, many platforms render it as a red heart automatically, which quietly breaks a monochrome layout and overrides your CSS colour. The text variation selector U+FE0E, appended directly after the character, forces the plain glyph. Every card face on this site maps its suit through that selector, which is why the suits pick up the page accent instead of arriving pre-coloured.
The one genuine gap in the block is worth flagging: the knight of each suit exists (U+1F0AC and friends) because the block models the 56-card tarot deck, so ranks run ace, two through ten, jack, knight, queen, king. If you iterate the code points blindly to build a standard 52-card deck you will pick up four knights you did not want. Skip the knight code point in each suit.
Games drawn with these characters
Every board on this site is built from Unicode, not sprites. These ones use the characters above.
Frequently asked questions
How do I copy card suit symbols?
Click any character above to copy it to your clipboard. To type them instead: on Windows hold Alt and type 6 for ♠, 3 for ♥, 4 for ♦ and 5 for ♣; on macOS open the Emoji & Symbols viewer with Control-Command-Space and search for the suit name.
Why do my hearts and diamonds turn red automatically?
They have an emoji presentation as well as a text one, and several platforms pick emoji by default. Append the text variation selector U+FE0E immediately after the character to force the monochrome glyph, after which it inherits your text colour normally.
Is there a Unicode character for every playing card?
Yes. The Playing Cards block at U+1F0A0–U+1F0F5 encodes all 52 cards individually, plus jokers and a card back. Note that it also includes a knight in each suit — the block models the 56-card tarot deck — so a standard deck means skipping those four code points.
Can I change the colour of a card suit symbol?
Yes, provided you get the text presentation rather than the emoji one. As text they respond to CSS `color` like any character, so you can render ♥ in cyan or ♠ in amber. Emoji presentation ignores colour entirely, which is the reason to use U+FE0E.
What is the difference between ♠ and ♤?
They are filled and outlined versions of the same suit. Unicode names them "black spade suit" and "white spade suit", but the names describe fill, not colour — you can colour either one however you want. Pairing them is a colour-free way to show two players.
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