Zodiac and Planetary Symbols Copy and Paste

What each zodiac glyph actually depicts

Most of the 12 glyphs are compressed pictures of the thing the sign is named after. Once you see what each one is drawing, they are hard to forget.

Two pairs are easy to confuse. Virgo ♍ and Scorpio ♏ are both an M shape: Virgo's third stroke loops inward, Scorpio's shoots outward into a barb. Leo ♌ and Cancer ♋ both use curls, but Leo's is a single mane and tail while Cancer's is a pair of facing claws.

• ♈ Aries: the curved horns of a ram, or a ram's face seen head on.
• ♉ Taurus: a bull's head, a circle with horns rising from it.
• ♊ Gemini: the Roman numeral II, two figures side by side.
• ♋ Cancer: two claws, sometimes read as the crab seen from above.
• ♌ Leo: the lion's mane sweeping into its tail.
• ♍ Virgo: an M with an inward loop, from the Greek parthenos, maiden.
• ♎ Libra: a beam balance, or the sun sitting on the horizon.
• ♏ Scorpio: an M ending in the scorpion's raised sting.
• ♐ Sagittarius: the centaur's arrow on its bowstring.
• ♑ Capricorn: the sea goat, a goat's horn running into a fish tail.
• ♒ Aquarius: two lines of running water.
• ♓ Pisces: two fish facing away from each other, joined by a cord.

Where the planetary symbols come from

The classical seven (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) carry attributes of their gods. ☉ is a shield with a boss. ☿ is Mercury's winged cap over his caduceus. ♀ is a hand mirror. ♂ is a shield with a spear laid across it. ♃ and ♄ are stylised Greek letters: a zeta for Zeus and a kappa-rho ligature for Kronos, each given a cross bar in Christian-era manuscripts.

The modern planets were given new glyphs at discovery. Uranus has two competing forms: the astronomical ⛢, an H for William Herschel, and the astrological ♅, a circle with a spear. Neptune got a trident ♆. Pluto got the PL monogram ♇, which doubles as the initials of Percival Lowell, whose observatory ran the search that found it.

Alchemy used the same glyphs for the seven metals it paired with the seven planets: ☉ gold, ☽ silver, ☿ mercury, ♀ copper, ♂ iron, ♃ tin, ♄ lead. Biology later borrowed two of them, which is why ♀ and ♂ now mean female and male on forms and toilet doors.

Astronomy and astrology use the same symbols differently

Astronomers still use the planetary glyphs, mostly as compact labels: in ephemerides, on orbital diagrams, in journal tables and in the notation for solar and terrestrial units (M☉ for a solar mass, R⊕ for an Earth radius). The International Astronomical Union treats ⛢ as the standard Uranus glyph and generally avoids the sign symbols altogether.

In astrology, the same glyph means a position and an interpretation: ♂ in ♑ is Mars in Capricorn. Astrologers add points that are not objects at all, such as the lunar nodes ☊ and ☋ (where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic) and Black Moon Lilith ⚸ (the Moon's apogee).

Worth saying plainly: astrology is a long-lived system of belief and interpretation, not a science. Controlled studies have not found that birth charts predict personality or events. That does not make the symbols any less interesting, and plenty of people use them for meaning, decoration or identity without treating them as physics.

Tropical, sidereal and why your sign may not match the sky

Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, which anchors 0 degrees Aries to the spring equinox and divides the year into 12 equal 30 degree slices. That is where the familiar date ranges come from, and it is why the dates shift by a day either way depending on the year and your time zone.

The sky has moved since those slices were named. The Earth's axis wobbles over a roughly 26,000 year cycle (precession of the equinoxes), so the tropical signs have drifted about one whole sign away from the constellations that share their names. If you were born on 1 April, the Sun was in the tropical sign Aries but standing in front of the constellation Pisces.

Vedic or Jyotish astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, which stays tied to the stars. It is the reason a Vedic chart often gives a different sun sign from a Western one, usually the previous sign. Neither is more accurate than the other in astronomical terms: they are two different coordinate conventions.

The constellation boundaries the IAU fixed in 1930 also add a thirteenth constellation on the ecliptic, Ophiuchus ⛎. Newspapers rediscover this every few years. Astrologers have not adopted it, because the tropical zodiac is built on the seasons rather than on the constellations.

How to type zodiac and planetary symbols

Clicking the buttons on this page is the quickest route, but the code points are stable and easy to type directly once you know them. The signs run in one unbroken block from U+2648 Aries to U+2653 Pisces, and the planets sit just before them from U+2609.

On Windows, hold ALT and type the decimal code on the numeric keypad (ALT 9800 gives ♈), or press the Windows key plus full stop for the emoji and symbol panel and choose the symbols tab. In Microsoft Word, type 2648 and press ALT + X.

On a Mac, press CTRL plus CMD plus SPACE to open the Character Viewer and search for the sign name. Aries, Taurus and the rest are all findable by name.

On iOS and Android there is no zodiac key on the standard keyboard, so copying from this page and pasting is usually fastest. Adding a text replacement shortcut (Settings, Keyboard, Text Replacement) lets you type something like ;leo and have ♌ appear.

• HTML: ♈ for ♈ through ♓ for ♓, or paste the character directly into UTF-8 source.
• CSS content: \2648 for ♈.
• Add the variation selector U+FE0F after a sign to force the colour emoji version in apps that support both.

Reading a birth chart: the glyph legend

A birth chart is a circle divided twice: into 12 signs around the rim and 12 houses inside it. Planet glyphs are plotted around the wheel at the degree they occupied at a given moment, and coloured lines across the middle mark the aspects between them.

Reading one is mostly a matter of knowing which family each glyph belongs to. Sign glyphs sit on the rim, planet glyphs sit inside with a degree number next to them, and the aspect glyphs appear in the grid or table underneath.

• Rim: the 12 sign glyphs ♈ to ♓, each covering 30 degrees.
• Inside the wheel: ☉ ☽ ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄ ♅ ♆ ♇, each with a sign and a degree.
• Angles: Asc for the ascendant or rising sign, MC for the midheaven, usually written as letters rather than glyphs.
• Nodes and points: ☊ north node, ☋ south node, ⚸ Black Moon Lilith, ⚷ Chiron.
• Asteroids, if the chart includes them: ⚳ Ceres, ⚴ Pallas, ⚵ Juno, ⚶ Vesta.
• Aspect lines and table: ☌ conjunction, ⚹ sextile, □ square, △ trine, ☍ opposition, ⚻ quincunx.
• Elements, if the chart summarises them: 🜂 fire, 🜃 earth, 🜁 air, 🜄 water.