Music symbols.

Notes you can paste

Music symbols are popular as decorative characters — a ♪ or ♫ in a playlist title, a social bio, a username or a message instantly signals "music." The note symbols (♩ ♪ ♫ ♬) and the accidentals (♭ ♮ ♯) are widely supported and render in plain text everywhere. The clef and repeat symbols (𝄞 𝄢) are real notation characters but live in a higher Unicode range, so their support is patchier and they may show as a box on older systems or in some apps — test them on your target platform before relying on them. For actual sheet music you'd want notation software, but for a decorative touch these copy and paste anywhere.

How to type music symbols

Copying from the grid above is the fastest route, but if you need to type one directly:

• Windows: hold Alt and type 13 on the numeric keypad for ♪, or 14 for ♫. These two come from the original PC character set, so they work in most Windows apps.
• Windows, any character: press Win + . to open the emoji panel and switch to the symbols tab.
• Word and Outlook: type the hex code and press Alt + X — 266A becomes ♪, 266D becomes ♭, 266F becomes ♯.
• macOS: Ctrl + Cmd + Space opens the Character Viewer; search "eighth note" or "flat sign".
• Linux: Ctrl + Shift + U, then type 266a, then Enter.
• HTML and CSS: ♪ is ♪, and the three accidentals have names — ♭ ♭, ♮ ♮, ♯ ♯. In CSS use the escape form, content: "\266a". More codes are on the HTML entities page.

What each symbol means

The four note characters show note values: ♩ (U+2669) is a quarter note, worth one beat in common time; ♪ (U+266A) is an eighth note, half a beat; ♫ (U+266B) is a pair of eighth notes joined by a beam; and ♬ (U+266C) is a beamed pair of sixteenth notes. The accidentals change pitch — ♭ lowers a note by a semitone, ♯ raises it by one, and ♮ cancels an accidental that applied earlier in the bar.

Watch the two lookalikes. The sharp sign ♯ has two slanted horizontal strokes and upright verticals; the number sign # (U+0023) is the plain keyboard hash and is the wrong character in a key signature. The same goes for the flat ♭ against a lowercase "b". And ♪ is not the same as the coloured emoji 🎵 (U+1F3B5) or 🎶 (U+1F3B6) — those are separate characters that always render as pictures.

Rendering, fallbacks and screen readers

The clef, fermata and repeat characters (𝄞 𝄢 𝄐 𝄆 𝄇) sit in the Musical Symbols block starting at U+1D100, outside the Basic Multilingual Plane. Few text fonts cover that block, so a system without one draws the "tofu" placeholder box instead. If a clef matters, render it as an image or SVG rather than text. The notes and accidentals from U+2669 to U+266F are in the far better-supported Miscellaneous Symbols block and are safe almost everywhere.

Screen readers treat these inconsistently: some announce ♪ as "eighth note", others skip it entirely. So never let a note symbol carry meaning on its own — if ♪ marks "has audio" in a table, add a text label as well. In decorative use, a bio or a playlist name, that is not a concern.