Every music note symbol in one place — the everyday ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ plus flats, sharps, clefs and the full staff notation set. Tap any symbol to copy it. Each of the main ones is labelled with its real name and Unicode code point, because the most common question about these is not how to copy them but what they actually are.
Music symbols split into two very different groups, and knowing which is which saves a lot of empty boxes.
The everyday notes — ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ — come from the Miscellaneous Symbols block, which has been in Unicode since the early 1990s. They render essentially everywhere: phones, desktops, chat apps, spreadsheets.
The staff notation set — 𝄞 𝄢 and the note-head symbols — lives in the Musical Symbols block, which is far newer and much less widely included in system fonts. These are the ones most likely to appear as a rectangle, particularly on older Android builds. That is a general expectation based on how long each block has existed rather than a per-device test — paste it where you plan to use it and look before you rely on it.
If a symbol has to render for everyone, stay with ♪ ♫ ♬.
These get used decoratively, but each has a real meaning in notation, and the difference is visible at a glance once you know it.
- ♩ Quarter note — one beat. The plain note head with a stem.
- ♪ Eighth note — half a beat. One flag on the stem. The most commonly used symbol of the set.
- ♫ Beamed eighth notes — two eighth notes joined by a beam.
- ♬ Beamed sixteenth notes — two sixteenths, joined by a double beam.
- ♭ ♮ ♯ Flat, natural, sharp — accidentals. They lower, cancel and raise a pitch by a semitone.
- 𝄞 𝄢 Treble and bass clef — these set which pitches the lines of a stave represent.
For decoration none of this matters. But if the music note symbol is going anywhere music-adjacent, using ♭ where you meant ♯ is the kind of detail musicians notice immediately.
Copying works everywhere, but if you use these often it is worth knowing the direct routes.
- Windows — hold Alt and type 13 on the numeric keypad for ♪, or 14 for ♫. These two come from the original IBM code page, which is why they have such short codes.
- Word and Outlook — type the Unicode code point then press Alt+X. For example 266C followed by Alt+X becomes ♬.
- macOS — open the Character Viewer with Control+Command+Space and search for 'note'.
- HTML — use the numeric entity, for example `♪` for ♪.
The labelled cards at the top of this page show each symbol's code point, so you can build the entity or Alt+X sequence for any of them.