What Are Check Mark Symbols?
Check mark symbols are Unicode characters, not a font. The light tick ✓ is U+2713 and its heavier sibling ✔ is U+2714, both from the Dingbats block, the same block that gives you the ballot cross ✗ (U+2717) and heavy ballot cross ✘ (U+2718). The boxes come from Miscellaneous Symbols: an empty ballot box ☐ (U+2610), a ticked one ☑ (U+2611) and one crossed out with an X ☒ (U+2612). The green ✅ is a different character again, "white heavy check mark" at U+2705, which is emoji-only and always draws as a coloured square.
A few of the rarer entries above deserve a warning. The light check 🗸 and the bold boxed tick 🗹 sit in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block and were added for Wingdings compatibility, so older phones show a blank box for them. The inverse tick 🮱 belongs to the Symbols for Legacy Computing block and renders on very few devices. Many people simply type the square-root sign √ (U+221A) when they need a tick, because it has shipped in every font since the 1990s, and it is included here for that reason.
Because these are plain characters, a screen reader reads their official names aloud: "check mark", "ballot box with check" or "heavy ballot x". That is actually helpful in a to-do list, since a listener hears whether each line is done. It becomes noisy only when a decorative row of ticks is pasted purely as ornament, so keep the ticks for lines that genuinely need a status.
Why Use Check Mark Symbols?
Most chat apps and profile fields have no checkbox feature. WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord and Instagram let you format a little text, but none of them will draw a real tick box for you. Pasting ☐ and ☑ gives you a visible checklist in any of them, and readers understand it without explanation.
The three ticks also carry different tones, which matters more than people expect. ✓ is thin and looks like a mark on paper, so it suits a quiet "done" at the end of a sentence. ✔ is heavier and reads as emphatic, a good match for bold fonts in a headline. ✅ is a big green square that cannot be missed, which makes it ideal for announcements ("✅ Orders shipped") but too loud for a tidy list of six items. The pairing ✔ yes ✘ no from the combos section is the neutral choice for polls and comparisons, since both marks share the same weight.
X marks need the same care. ✗ and ✘ are the "wrong" or "not included" marks and look like handwriting, while ❌ is a red emoji that signals an error or a hard stop. ✖ is officially a multiplication sign, so it is the safest choice when you want a plain black X in text. If you need decorative or religious crosses rather than marks, the cross symbols page has those.
Status symbols round out the set. A ⚠ before a line flags a caveat, ℹ marks a note and ⭕ is used in Japan for "correct", the opposite of ❌, which occasionally confuses readers elsewhere.
Where Can You Use Check Mark Symbols?
Where a text checklist survives, and what to expect:
- WhatsApp: no list formatting beyond bullets, so ☐ and ☑ are the standard way to track a shopping list in a group chat. Edit the message to flip a box.
- Discord: the markdown has no task-list syntax, so `☐ pending` and `☑ done` in a pinned message do the job. Inside a code block the ticks keep monospace alignment.
- Telegram: channel posts and pinned messages hold ticks fine; the built-in polls remain the better option for actual voting.
- Reddit: the `- [ ]` syntax from GitHub is not rendered, so a ☑ character is the reliable workaround in posts and wiki pages.
- Apple Notes and Notion: both have real checklists (the checklist button in Notes, typing `[]` in Notion), so use those when you can, and paste the characters only into plain-text titles or headings.
- Instagram and TikTok bios: a ✓ after a verified-looking claim is common, though it does not make an account verified. ✅ takes the same space as one emoji.
The green ✅ and red ❌ display identically on iPhone and Android, apart from a slightly different shade. The plain ✓ and ☑ vary by font: Apple draws them thin and grey, Samsung's font makes them a touch bolder, and Windows Segoe UI Symbol gives them a blocky look.
How to Copy and Paste Check Mark Symbols
- Decide whether you want a text tick (✓ or ✔), a boxed one (☑), or the green emoji ✅, and find it in the first section. Boxes and X marks are in the next two sections.
- Tap the symbol to copy it to your clipboard. Tap ☐, then a tick, then an X, and the bar at the top of the page collects them into one line you can copy together.
- Switch to your app, place the cursor at the start of a line and paste. Repeat for each line of your to-do list, replacing ☐ with ☑ as you finish tasks.
Tips for Using Check Mark Symbols
Text or emoji presentation
✔ and ☑ are dual-style characters: with an emoji variation selector attached (✔️) they appear as coloured emoji, without one they stay flat. Android and Windows tend to show the plain version, iPhones sometimes pick the emoji. If you must have a green box, use ✅, which has no text version. If you must have a flat tick, ✓ is safest, since it has no emoji form at all.
Typing a tick on Windows and Mac
There is no Alt code for ✓ in the old code page, which is why so many people use Alt + 251 (√) instead. In Word, Outlook and most Office apps, type 2713 and then press Alt + X to convert it into ✓; 2714 gives ✔ and 2611 gives ☑. In the Wingdings font, the letters ü and þ show a tick and a ticked box, but that only works while the text stays in Wingdings. On a Mac, press Control + Command + Space, search "check" and double-click the mark you want, or add a text replacement in Keyboard settings so typing something like "xtick" expands to ✓.
Aligning a checklist
Use the same box on every line so the text after it lines up. Mixing ☐ with ⬜ looks ragged because the emoji square is nearly twice as wide. In a Discord code block or a Reddit code section, ☐ and ☑ usually share a width, which keeps columns straight.
Keep quiz marks consistent
For right and wrong answers pick one pair and stick to it: ✓ with ✗, ✔ with ✘, or ✅ with ❌. Mixing a thin tick with a heavy red emoji cross implies the wrong answers matter more than the right ones.
Small text next to ticks
If you want a compact status line such as "✓ ᴠᴇʀɪꜰɪᴇᴅ", combine a tick with letters from the small fonts generator, then check it in the target app, because small caps and ticks are drawn from different fonts and may not sit on the same baseline.