Worked example: one name, six lengths
Take “Night Owl”: eight letters and a space.
| Style | Result | Characters | UTF-16 units |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain text | Night Owl | 9 | 9 |
| Bold | 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐎𝐰𝐥 | 9 | 17 |
| Double-struck | ℕ𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥 𝕆𝕨𝕝 | 9 | 16 |
| Small caps | Nɪɢʜᴛ Oᴡʟ | 9 | 9 |
| Circled (bubble) | Ⓝⓘⓖⓗⓣ Ⓞⓦⓛ | 9 | 9 |
| Strikethrough | N̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶O̶w̶l̶ | 18 | 18 |
Plain, it is 9 characters and 9 units. In bold it still looks like 9, but each bold letter sits outside the Basic Multilingual Plane and takes two UTF-16 units, 17 in all. Double-struck comes to 16, one fewer, because its N is the older ℕ, which fits in one unit. Small caps and circled stay level with the plain text. Strikethrough looks the same length yet doubles the count to 18, since every letter carries an invisible mark. Against a sixteen-unit limit, 4 of these 6 rows fit. That gap between what you see and what gets counted is the reason the length filter exists.
How the styles are made
None of these is a font. Each style swaps your letters for other characters that Unicode encodes separately, which is why they survive a paste into a plain text box. The serif, sans-serif, script, gothic, double-struck and monospace styles come from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block, U+1D400 to U+1D7FF, added in Unicode 3.1. The Unicode names list is blunt about its purpose: the block is meant for mathematical variables, and ordinary text should use ordinary letters with formatting (NamesList.txt, Unicode Character Database 18.0.0 (Unicode Consortium)).
Some letters are missing from those alphabets. The double-struck C, H, N, P, Q, R and Z, a handful of script capitals and the italic h were already in Unicode 1.1, in Letterlike Symbols, so the later block left reserved gaps where they would have gone. The styler fills each gap with the older character, so words come out whole.
Circled, squared and bracketed letters come from the enclosed alphanumeric blocks. Small caps, superscript and subscript borrow phonetic and modifier letters, so a few letters have no form and stay as typed: there is no small capital X, and subscripts exist for only seventeen letters. Strikethrough, slashed, underline and the wavy line add a combining mark after every character. Upside-down, mirrored, Warband, Warlord and rune-like swap in lookalikes from other alphabets, chosen by shape rather than meaning. The rune-like style is decoration, not a translation.
Limits and gotchas
- Length is counted in more than one way. Some systems count UTF-16 units, some count characters, some count bytes. Set “Count length as” to match the box you're filling in, or keep to the stricter UTF-16 figure.
- Combining marks are fragile. A box may strip them, refuse the whole name or draw the line in the wrong place.
- Fonts have holes. A device without the character shows an empty box instead. Phones, consoles and older computers differ, so check on the screen where people will actually see it.
- Search and filters see different letters. Someone typing your name in plain letters may not find the styled one, and lookalike letters can trip impersonation filters.
- The input stops at 100 characters. Styles are for names and short lines; long passages turn unreadable fast.
When to leave text plain
Screen readers handle these characters badly. Depending on the software, a bold name may be spelled out letter by letter, announced with each character's mathematical name, or skipped. So keep plain text wherever accessibility or being found matters: a business or legal name, contact details, the words of a link in a bio, anything someone needs to search for or retype. A styled accent beside a plain name is a fair compromise, and the Plain text row stays at the top so the original is always one tap away. The guide to styled bios goes further into those trade-offs, the name styler for games deals with tight name limits, and Unicode fonts and fancy text explained covers the characters themselves.
Questions people ask
Is this a font I can install?
No. The results are ordinary Unicode characters, so they paste anywhere text goes, but how they look depends on the fonts on the device showing them.
Why was a name that fits here still refused?
The box may count length differently, accept only certain characters, or reject combining marks. Try the UTF-16 count, a row without a warning line, or plain text.
Do favourites keep a copy of my text?
No. Only the names of the styles you star are kept, in this browser's local storage, and “Clear favourites” deletes them.
Last reviewed: