Old English font alphabet
Old English font alphabet, A to Z
The Old English font alphabet, as characters rather than a font file. Every capital and lowercase letter below copies on its own, and because these are real Unicode characters rather than something you install, they survive the trip into an Instagram bio, a username or a Word document with nothing downloaded first.
The plain letter sits under each shape on purpose: blackletter capitals are genuinely hard to tell apart, and an unlabelled chart of twenty-six capital letters is a puzzle rather than a reference. If you want a whole word or a name rather than one letter, the generator on the homepage does it in twenty styles at once. Digits are a different and unhappier story, covered on Old English font numbers.
Bold Fraktur alphabet, A to Z
Every Old English capital letter and every lowercase one, and the set to use if you only want one. Unicode encodes all fifty-two in a single block, so nothing here is borrowed and nothing falls back to a different weight.
Capitals
Tap any capital to copy
Lowercase
Tap any lowercase letter to copy
Fraktur alphabet, A to Z
The lighter cut, and the one with the holes. Five of its capitals live somewhere else in Unicode entirely, which is what the section below is about.
Capitals
Tap any capital to copy
Lowercase
Tap any lowercase letter to copy
The five borrowed capitals
Fraktur is missing C, H, I, R and Z. They were encoded years earlier for mathematics, in a block called Letterlike Symbols, and Unicode never encodes a character twice, so the alphabet is assembled from two places. Miss one and a word like "Charles" comes out with a box where the C should be.
- ℭCU+212D
- ℌHU+210C
- ℑIU+2111
- ℜRU+211C
- ℨZU+2128
Bold Fraktur has no such gaps, which is the practical reason to prefer it. Every generator that gets this wrong produces a word with a replacement box in the middle of it, and the mistake is invisible until somebody else reads the result.
The C is the letter people ask about by name, and they ask for it as a gangster Old English C far more often than as a fraktur one, which is the hand-drawn look these shapes are the skeleton of. The same letters answer to gothic as well, which is the older name for the whole family and the one that causes the most confusion, because it names two other things that are not this. Asked for by date rather than by look they are medieval letters, and the face most likely to be sitting in your own font menu already is the Old English Text MT font. Script borrows too, eleven letters to Fraktur's five with a lowercase e, g and o among them, and the page on cursive Old English letters sets out all eleven.
The letters copy. The numbers do not.
People want letters and numbers together, and this is the point where that comes apart. Unicode added this alphabet for mathematics, where the ordinary digits were already doing the job, so nobody ever encoded a blackletter 4. Six of the other styles do handle digits, and some of them sit beside these letters far better than others.
Old English font numbers, and what to useQuestions
Questions about the alphabet
How do I copy and paste Old English letters into Instagram or a username?
Tap the letter you want and paste it wherever you are typing. Old English letters copy and paste like any other text, because that is what they are. Nothing is installed and nothing is downloaded, because what you copied is a character rather than a font, and the character carries its own shape with it. That is also why it survives the trip: an Instagram bio, a Discord name, a Word document and a YouTube title all handle it the same way. The one place to check first is a username field, since some sites reject anything outside plain A to Z.
Why does the capital C look different from the letters around it?
Because it was drawn by somebody else, for something else. Unicode refuses to encode the same character twice, and by the time the fraktur alphabet was added, a handful of its capitals already existed in an older block put there for mathematics. Rather than duplicate them, the standard points at the originals, so the alphabet you are copying is assembled out of two addresses. The borrowed letters are correct; they simply were not drawn to sit beside the other twenty-one and do not always match their weight. Bold Fraktur was encoded in one piece and sidesteps the whole thing, which is why it is the first chart here.
Which Old English capital letters are easiest to misread?
The capital I and J, first. They started out as a single letter and fraktur never drew them far apart, so on their own they are close to the same shape, with the J hanging a little lower. The capital A is the other one: a rounded bowl with a stroke down its right side, which passes for a U in some faces and an H in others. That is why every cell in the charts has the plain letter printed under it, so check that before you copy a lone capital. For a name going on skin, the tattoo page compares each of these pairs in eight real typefaces.
Why do some letters show up as empty boxes?
That is the device you are reading on, not the text. A box means the font in use has no drawing for that character, so it falls back to a placeholder. It happens most with the filled circle and boxed styles, which some platforms treat as emoji rather than as letters. Bold Fraktur is the safest set to use anywhere, because it is the only blackletter alphabet Unicode encodes completely.
Are gothic letters and Old English letters the same thing?
In everyday use, yes. Gothic, blackletter, fraktur and Old English all get used for the same dense, angular lettering, and people searching for any of them usually want what is on this page. Typographers do separate them: blackletter is the family, fraktur is one branch of it, and Old English is really a font name that escaped and became a genre. None of that changes which characters you copy.
Can I get numbers in this alphabet?
No, and no site can give you them. Unicode contains no blackletter digits at all, so there is nothing to convert 0 to 9 into. Any generator that appears to manage it has swapped in digits from an unrelated set without mentioning it. Six of the other styles handle digits properly, and the numbers page lines each of them up against blackletter letters so you can see which pairing is least jarring for a date.
Is this the same as the Old English alphabet from history?
No, and the two get confused constantly. The historical Old English alphabet is what Anglo-Saxon scribes wrote English with, and it had letters modern English has since lost, among them thorn, eth, wynn and ash. This page is about the Old English typeface, the blackletter style, which is simply a way of drawing the ordinary modern alphabet. Same name, unrelated things.
Can I download this as a font or print it?
Not from here. This site deliberately ships no font files, because the whole point of these characters is that they need none. If you want Old English lettering in a design tool, a printable or a tattoo stencil, you want an actual typeface rather than Unicode characters, and that is a different kind of resource entirely.