Old English cursive font
Type a name or a line into this cursive Old English font generator and copy it in flowing script or in blackletter. Unicode keeps the two apart, so no pasted style is cursive and gothic at once. This page shows each side by side, then your words in a real cursive blackletter face.
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Bold Script
Safe in all 5 apps we checked
๐๐ธ๐ป๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ป
That is already styled text.
Cursive and blackletter
Your text in the two scripts, the two blackletters and the italic, each with a note on which half of "cursive Old English" it gives you. The other styles are on the homepage.
๐๐ธ๐ป๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ป
Safe in all 5 apps we checked
What most people mean by cursive Old English, and it is not Old English at all: a copperplate script with long loops. Every letter comes from one block, so it keeps one weight from the first letter to the last.
โฑโด๐โฏ๐โฏ๐
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The hairline version. Eleven letters, including a lowercase e, g and o, are older symbols from mathematics, so a word like "Emerald" mixes two drawings. Fine for a short name, risky for a sentence.
๐ฑ๐๐๐๐๐๐
Safe in all 5 apps we checked
The blackletter half of the request, upright and broken rather than flowing. Pick this when "Old English" matters more than "cursive".
๐๐ฌ๐ฏ๐ข๐ณ๐ข๐ฏ
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Lighter blackletter, with C, H, I, R and Z borrowed from another part of Unicode. Pairs with Script better than Bold Fraktur does, because both are thin.
๐ญ๐๐๐๐๐๐
Safe in all 5 apps we checked
Slanted, not joined. Italic type was cut from a Renaissance cursive hand in 1501, so this is the oldest sense of the word here, and the easiest of the five to read.
Every cursive gothic font generator hands you one of two alphabets. Script flows, but its shapes are eighteenth-century copperplate, the hand on a wedding invitation. Fraktur is real blackletter, but it stands upright and every letter is its own block. Unicode encoded both for mathematicians and never a third alphabet that joins them.
The letters never link up either, in any style. A joined hand needs a font that draws each letter's connection to the next, and pasted characters carry no font, so every one is drawn on its own. What survives is the look, not the pen stroke.
Your text, two ways to paste
Tap to copy
Flows, but it is copperplate.
Old English, but upright and unjoined.
Fruktur Italic. A real font: blackletter drawn as an italic. A picture of cursive Old English, not text you can paste.
Forever
Fruktur is a modern design, not a copy of any historical hand. It is the closest free face to flowing blackletter, and the next section shows what it stands in for.
For a document, a logo or a print file you want the font itself, not pasted characters. Fruktur, the face on the card above, is free on Google Fonts under the Open Font License, which allows commercial use. The download holds two styles; the cursive one is Fruktur Italic.
Open the downloaded file and choose Install, in Font Book on a Mac or by right-clicking on Windows, and it appears in Word and most other apps after a restart. Canva only takes uploaded fonts on a paid plan.
Cursive Old English is a real thing, just not a Unicode one. Alongside the stiff book hands, scribes wrote fast everyday blackletter for four centuries, and these are its names.
From the 1200s
Gothic handwriting for documents rather than books: charters, letters, accounts. Written fast, with loops on the ascenders and letters that run into each other. The word cursive is Latin for running.
England, about 1270 to 1650
The English cursive blackletters. Secretary hand is what a Tudor clerk wrote and what Shakespeare signed in, and it is the closest thing to a real cursive Old English.
The 1400s
A cross between the formal book hand and the document hand, which is where the name comes from. The Burgundian court used it for its finest books, so it is flowing and grand at once.
About 1480, and taught until 1941
Schwabacher is the rounder German print type before fraktur. Kurrent is German joined-up handwriting in the same spirit, taught in schools until a 1941 decree banned it along with fraktur.
None of these reached Unicode, which encodes styles mathematicians asked for rather than historical hands. For the upright book hands that did get in, and when each was written, see the medieval font page.
Plain Script has eleven letters that are not where the rest of the alphabet lives. They were encoded earlier as maths symbols, the Hamiltonian's H and the Laplace transform's L among them, and Unicode never encodes a character twice. That is why a Script word can look uneven, and three of the gaps are lowercase, which never happens in Fraktur.
Bold Script has none of these gaps, so its alphabet below is complete, capitals and lowercase. For single blackletter letters, the Old English font alphabet has both fraktur sets, A to Z.
In Bold Script. Tap a letter to copy it. Script has no digits in Unicode, so numbers stay plain.
Tap any capital to copy
Tap any lowercase letter to copy
Paste Bold Script to show an artist the flow you want, or Bold Fraktur for the weight, and say which half matters more. Good artists draw cursive blackletter by hand, joining the letters the way no pasted text can. For a file, sizing and the letter pairs that blur on skin, use the Old English font tattoo generator. Searching for a gangster Old English cursive font usually means the Chicano style, which artists draw freehand; see the gangster Old English page.
Questions
Not as one alphabet. What pastes as Old English cursive is either Script, which flows, or Fraktur, which is blackletter. Pick by the word that matters more to you. A font that is both, like Fruktur Italic above, has to be installed or saved as an image, because a font file cannot travel inside pasted text.
Yes. Fruktur Italic is released under the SIL Open Font License, which allows commercial use in print, logos, products and websites, with no fee and no credit required. The one thing the licence forbids is selling the font file on its own. Download it from Google Fonts, linked above.
Historians call the family gothic cursive, or cursiva. The English forms are Anglicana and Secretary hand, the formal mixed one is bastarda, and the German print and handwriting versions are Schwabacher and Kurrent. Old English is a printersโ nickname for blackletter, not the name of any of these.
Script is round, looped and slanted, descended from copperplate penmanship. Old English is dense, upright and angular, descended from medieval book hands. In a generator they come from two separate Unicode alphabets, so the choice changes every character in the line rather than just its style.
Yes, in a generator. Both phrases get the same two answers here, Script and Fraktur, because gothic and Old English are two names for blackletter. Sites that sell one style as cursive gothic are handing out plain Script under a different label.
Because every pasted character is drawn alone. Joined handwriting fonts connect letters with rules inside the font file, and pasted text carries no font. The app you paste into picks a font of its own for these characters, and it has no idea which letter comes next.
Not in pasted text. Script, Bold Script and both fraktur styles have no digits in Unicode, so 0 to 9 stay plain. The Fruktur Italic font does have its own digits, so a year works in the installed font or in a PNG saved from this page.
Yes, all five styles paste into bios, names and messages there. Bold Script is the safer of the two scripts, because plain Script mixes in older symbols that some phones draw from a different font and at a slightly different size.
No. Writing it is a pen skill: a broad nib held at a steady angle, practised on letter drills. This page shows what the letters look like and lets you paste them. For learning the hand, look for a Secretary hand or bastarda calligraphy course or worksheet.