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Chess symbols in Unicode

Text characters representing chess pieces

Summary

Text characters representing chess pieces

Refer to caption — FreeSerif]], Quivira, Pecita.

A screenshot of the GNU Chess program in graphic mode showing the chessboard with Unicode characters. — [[GNU Chess]] using Unicode chess characters to display a chess board in the terminal.

Unicode has text representations of chess pieces. These allow to produce the symbols using plain text 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, queen, rook, bishop, knight, 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 pieces.

In 2024, four shatranj pieces were provisionally assigned for a future version in the range U+1FA54–U+1FA57. This was completed in Unicode 17.0.

Miscellaneous symbols

Code point	HTML (decimal)	HTML (hex)
U+2654	♔	♔
U+2655	♕	♕
U+2656	♖	♖
U+2657	♗	♗
U+2658	♘	♘
U+2659	♙	♙
U+265A	♚	♚
U+265B	♛	♛
U+265C	♜	♜
U+265D	♝	♝
U+265E	♞	♞
U+265F	♟	♟

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.

base+VS16 (emoji)

References

"Chess Symbols". Unicode Consortium.
(22 December 2023). "Unicode request for ''shatranj'' symbols". Unicode Consortium.
Unicode. "Proposed New Characters: The Pipeline".
Abdu, Juber Moulvi. (2017-10-04). "Chess Emoji Submission". Unicode Consortium.
Daniel, Jeniffer. (2024-04-15). "Emoji Standard & Research Working Group Report for UTC #179 (2024Q2)". Unicode Consortium.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

chess-notation lists-of-symbols unicode

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