Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

has text representations of chess pieces. These allow to produce the symbols using

plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects ( floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a lim ...

without the need of a graphics interface. The inclusion of the chess symbols enables the use of figurine algebraic notation, which replaces the letter that stands for a piece by its symbol, e.g. ♛f1 instead of Qf1. This also allows the play of chess games in text-only environments, such as the terminal.

Unicode blocks

Unicode 15.1 specifies a total of 110 spread across two blocks. The standard set of chess pieces—

king King is a royal title given to a male monarch. A king is an Absolute monarchy, absolute monarch if he holds unrestricted Government, governmental power or exercises full sovereignty over a nation. Conversely, he is a Constitutional monarchy, ...

queen Queen most commonly refers to: * Queen regnant, a female monarch of a kingdom * Queen consort, the wife of a reigning king * Queen (band), a British rock band Queen or QUEEN may also refer to: Monarchy * Queen dowager, the widow of a king * Q ...

, rook,

bishop A bishop is an ordained member of the clergy who is entrusted with a position of Episcopal polity, authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance and administration of di ...

knight A knight is a person granted an honorary title of a knighthood by a head of state (including the pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church, or the country, especially in a military capacity. The concept of a knighthood ...

, or pawn, with white and black variants—were included in the block Miscellaneous Symbols. In Unicode 12.0, the Chess Symbols block (U+1FA00–U+1FA6F) was allocated for inclusion of extra chess piece representations. This includes fairy chess pieces, such as rotated pieces, neutral (neither white nor black) pieces, knighted pieces, equihoppers, as well as

xiangqi Xiangqi (; ), commonly known as Chinese chess or elephant chess, is a Strategy game, strategy board game for two players. It is the most popular board game in China. Xiangqi is in the same family of games as shogi, janggi, chess, Western ches ...

pieces. In 2024, four shatranj pieces have been provisionally assigned for a future version in the range U+1FA54–U+1FA57.

Miscellaneous symbols

Chess symbols

Emoji

In Unicode 11.0, an emojified representation of the character was added. As of Unicode 15.1, only this character has an emoji version. In 2024, a proposal was submitted to include emoji versions of the other standard chess symbols.

References

{{Chess Chess notation Lists of symbols Unicode