Discord Bold Font: Markdown Syntax and Unicode Bold Text Explained

Discord has always allowed users to format their messages in bold with a simple pair of asterisks. It’s been an easy way to draw attention, emphasize key points or highlight specific phrases.

Discord uses Markdown syntax as the default way to style text inside message bodies, but there are other fields that can’t be formatted with Markdown — and it seems like Discord wants you to stop using Markdown in those places anyway.

You can actually use Markdown to make your message appear in bold, too, and even if Markdown doesn’t work elsewhere (such as usernames), you may still have an option to apply bold styling to your username.

But if Markdown doesn’t render in some contexts, what do you do? You may not know where the fonts are, how to obtain them or even if they’re available for use.

We’ll go over what Discord considers a bold font and why it’s more than just Markdown.

The Problem

Markdown is typically used to control formatting of text within message bodies in Discord, though Markdown can also be used outside of chats to describe the appearance of content on Web pages.

However, Markdown isn’t the only way to stylize text on Discord — you can simply use characters known as “Unicode bold characters” instead. These special characters are often overlooked by most users, especially since they aren’t readily accessible on standard keyboards.

Unicode bold characters

Discord supports Unicode characters in addition to its native Markdown support. But while Markdown is applied to message bodies, many of the other locations in Discord can’t be styled with Markdown at all.

Instead, Unicode provides alternative options to stylize certain elements. One such category of characters includes so-called “bold characters,” which are characters designed to display bold without the need for additional formatting instructions.

Discord has long included bold versions of Latin letters in its emoji set, but those aren’t exactly considered Unicode bold characters. Instead, we’ll consider these “bold characters” from the Unicode Standard’s Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block.

There are a number of Unicode bold characters, including:

• The 1205 Unicode bold characters (U+1D400–U+1D7FF) for the Latin alphabet.

• The 1008 Unicode bold characters (U+1D6B0–U+1D6DF) for digits (digits 0–9).

That means there are more than 100,000 characters beyond what you might find on your keyboard, and it’s entirely possible you’ve never seen them before.

When pasted into a chat window, these bold characters will render as plain text (they won’t appear as literal asterisks, like what you would see if you tried to use Markdown). That means when they’re rendered on-screen, the bold version will appear.

Discord does offer a couple of methods to copy and paste the correct characters. We’ll walk you through them below.

Where can Unicode bold characters render?

As mentioned above, Unicode can be used to add stylistic flair to various parts of Discord. In particular, this works for:

• Usernames

• Nicknames

• Server names

• Channel names

• Role labels

• Status messages

• Bios

• Voice channel titles

Discord recommends using the right font for the job. On iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, and web clients, the real Unicode characters render correctly.

So, how can you actually get your hands on them? Fortunately, there are two free tools you can use to generate and access Unicode bold characters:

Discord Bold Text Generator

A browser-based bold text generator can do it for you. It doesn’t require you to sign in to any accounts, nor does it ask you to install anything else. There’s no restriction on how many times you can use it, either.

If you visit a bold generator page, you can simply type or paste whatever text you want into the box, click the “copy bold” button, and then copy it to wherever you need on Discord.

Pixelied Discord font generator

Another great option is Pixelied, a free online generator where you can select a font style as you type, with different options displayed on screen as you input text. Then, you can copy-paste the result to wherever you’d like on Discord.

Both of these tools are free and very straightforward, making them perfect for users who don’t want to bother trying to remember or figure out the correct Unicode characters for themselves.