Zodiac Emoji and Symbols: Every Sign, Planet and Moon Phase

All twelve, ready to copy:

• ♈ ♉ ♊ ♋Copy
• ♌ ♍ ♎ ♏Copy
• ♐ ♑ ♒ ♓Copy

Those are the astrological glyphs themselves rather than pictures of rams and crabs, which is what most people are actually after for a bio. Below: what each one means, the planet and moon symbols that go with them, a combo for every sign, and why yours sometimes renders purple when you wanted plain black.

The twelve signs with dates and elements

Dates shift by a day either way depending on the year, so treat the cusps as approximate rather than exact.

• ♈ Aries, 21 March to 19 April, fire, ruled by Mars
• ♉ Taurus, 20 April to 20 May, earth, ruled by Venus
• ♊ Gemini, 21 May to 20 June, air, ruled by Mercury
• ♋ Cancer, 21 June to 22 July, water, ruled by the Moon
• ♌ Leo, 23 July to 22 August, fire, ruled by the Sun
• ♍ Virgo, 23 August to 22 September, earth, ruled by Mercury
• ♎ Libra, 23 September to 22 October, air, ruled by Venus
• ♏ Scorpio, 23 October to 21 November, water, ruled by Mars and Pluto
• ♐ Sagittarius, 22 November to 21 December, fire, ruled by Jupiter
• ♑ Capricorn, 22 December to 19 January, earth, ruled by Saturn
• ♒ Aquarius, 20 January to 18 February, air, ruled by Saturn and Uranus
• ♓ Pisces, 19 February to 20 March, water, ruled by Jupiter and Neptune

The double rulerships for Scorpio, Aquarius and Pisces are the traditional ruler first and the modern one second. Traditional astrology predates the discovery of the outer planets, so those signs picked up a second ruler once Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were found. Which one an astrologer uses is a matter of school rather than fact.

Why these symbols are older than emoji by a long way

The zodiac glyphs sit at U+2648 through U+2653 and they entered Unicode in version 1.1, in 1993, alongside the card suits, the chess pieces and the weather symbols. They were plain typographic characters for fifteen years before emoji existed as a concept in the standard.

They were then given emoji presentation in Emoji 1.0 in 2015, which is where the rendering confusion comes from. The same character can now be a neat black glyph or a coloured tile depending on what follows it, which the next section deals with.

Why your zodiac symbol turns purple

Because most platforms draw the emoji form as a white glyph on a purple square, and an invisible character decides which form you get.

• ♈ on its own, or with U+FE0E after it, renders as plain text in your own font colour.
• ♈️ with U+FE0F after it forces the emoji tile.

So if you paste your sign into a bio and it arrives as a coloured square you did not want, copy the text version instead. The sets at the top of this page are the plain ones. Here they are again with the text selector applied explicitly, which survives more aggressive apps:

• ♈︎ ♉︎ ♊︎ ♋︎Copy
• ♌︎ ♍︎ ♎︎ ♏︎Copy
• ♐︎ ♑︎ ♒︎ ♓︎Copy

This is the same mechanism behind hearts and ticks turning colourful, covered in more detail in our check marks, arrows and stars guide.

Planet and celestial symbols

• ☉ ☽ ☾Copy
• ☿ ♀ ♂Copy
• ♃ ♄ ♅Copy
• ♆ ♇ ⚷Copy

What they are: ☉ Sun, ☽ waxing Moon, ☾ waning Moon, ☿ Mercury, ♀ Venus, ♂ Mars, ♃ Jupiter, ♄ Saturn, ♅ Uranus, ♆ Neptune, ♇ Pluto, ⚷ Chiron.

♀ and ♂ do double duty as the gender symbols, which is not a coincidence. They were the alchemical and astrological signs for Venus and Mars first, and Linnaeus borrowed them for botany in the eighteenth century, which is how they ended up meaning female and male. Worth knowing before you put one in a bio, because it will be read both ways.

The full set including the asteroid glyphs is on the planet symbols page, and the zodiac symbols page has the signs in every available variant.

Moon phases

The most used astrology adjacent emoji by a wide margin, and the ones people most often get in the wrong order.

• 🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔Copy
• 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘Copy
• 🌙 🌛 🌜 🌚Copy

The sequence runs new, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full, waning gibbous, last quarter, waning crescent, then back to new. If you are using them as a progress bar or a mood scale, that is the order that makes sense to anyone who looks closely.

🌙 is a crescent with no phase attached and it is the safest one for decorative use. 🌚 the new moon face has drifted a long way from astronomy and now mostly means something knowing or slightly menacing, which is worth knowing before you use it sincerely. We cover more shifts like that in our piece on emoji meanings people miss.

Decorative moon and star arrangements live on the moon and star symbols page, and the moon combos page has the emoji sets.

A combo for every sign

Built from the element, the ruling planet and the sign's usual associations rather than randomly picked.

• ♈🔥🗡️Copy
• ♉🌿🍇Copy
• ♊🦋💭Copy
• ♋🌙🐚Copy
• ♌☀️👑Copy
• ♍🌾📓Copy
• ♎⚖️🕊️Copy
• ♏🦂🖤Copy
• ♐🏹✨Copy
• ♑🏔️🤎Copy
• ♒💧⚡Copy
• ♓🐠🌊Copy

Two notes on these. Aquarius is an air sign despite the water carrier imagery, which catches people out constantly, so the 💧 is the jar rather than the element. And Scorpio is the only sign where the literal animal emoji works better than anything abstract, because 🦂 carries exactly the reputation the sign has.

Element combos

If you would rather signal the element than the specific sign, which is more common in bios than you might think:

• 🔥 Fire, for Aries, Leo and Sagittarius: 🔥♈♌♐
• 🌿 Earth, for Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn: 🌿♉♍♑
• 🌬️ Air, for Gemini, Libra and Aquarius: 🌬️♊♎♒
• 🌊 Water, for Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces: 🌊♋♏♓

Element sets age better than sign sets in a permanent bio, because they say something about how you want to come across rather than only when you were born.

Astrology bio decoration

Combining the glyphs with text ornaments is where most of the actual demand sits. Copy these:

• ˚｡⋆ ♓ ⋆｡˚Copy
• ⊹ ࣪ ˖ ♌ ˖ ࣪ ⊹Copy
• ✦ ♑ ✦Copy
• . ˳ ♡ ♒ ♡ ˳ .Copy
• ೃ࿔ ☽ ࿔*:･Copy

Swap the sign in the middle for yours. These are built from combining marks and rare spacing characters, so they occasionally render slightly differently between devices. More arrangements are on the star text borders page.

What each glyph actually depicts

These are not arbitrary squiggles. Most of them are worn down pictures of the thing the sign is named after, and once you know what you are looking at they become much easier to tell apart.

• ♈ is a ram's horns, seen head on.
• ♉ is a bull's head with horns, which is why it is a circle with a curve on top.
• ♊ is the Roman numeral two, for the twins.
• ♋ is usually explained as a crab's claws, though the older reading is two curled shapes facing away from each other.
• ♌ is a lion's mane and tail.
• ♍ is a letter M with a closing loop, traditionally read as a folded garment.
• ♎ is a pair of scales, and it is the only sign represented by an object rather than a creature or a person.
• ♏ is an M with a barb, the scorpion's sting.
• ♐ is an arrow, which makes it the most legible glyph of the twelve.
• ♑ is the most debated. It is usually read as a goat's head with a fish tail, from the sea goat of the older Babylonian tradition.
• ♒ is two waves, for air in motion rather than water.
• ♓ is two fish tied together, with the line between them as the cord.

♎ being the only object is worth sitting with for a second. Every other sign is something alive, which is one of the reasons Libra reads differently from the rest in almost every astrological tradition.

Using zodiac glyphs in usernames and game names

The zodiac signs are unusually good for this, better than most decorative symbols, for one specific reason: they sit in a low, very old part of Unicode that essentially every font supports.

That means ♏ will render in a game client, a forum, a Discord nickname and an old Android build, where ✧ or ᰔ may not. If you have had a name rejected or turned into boxes, the zodiac glyphs are a good fallback.

Two practical notes. First, copy the text form rather than the emoji form, or some platforms will render a coloured tile in the middle of your name. Second, a few name filters block ♂ and ♀ specifically because of their gender symbol meaning, so use the sign glyph rather than the planet if you hit that. For full name transformation rather than a single character, the fancy text generator handles the whole string, and we covered the platform rules in our username guide.

What about Ophiuchus

⛎ exists as an emoji, at U+26CE, and it is the serpent bearer.

The periodic news story that NASA has added a thirteenth sign is wrong every time it appears. Ophiuchus is a real constellation that the ecliptic passes through, and it has been known about for millennia. Western astrology has always used twelve thirty degree segments rather than the actual uneven constellations, so an extra constellation does not change anything about the system. NASA has occasionally explained the astronomy behind this in educational material, which then gets reported as NASA changing the horoscope.

Use ⛎ if you like it. It just is not going to renumber anybody's sun sign.

The emoji versions of each sign, and why they are worse

Alongside the glyphs, most platforms render a coloured tile for each sign, and several vendors have at some point drawn the animal instead of the symbol. The result is that ♈ can arrive on somebody else's phone as a ram's head illustration rather than the glyph you copied.

That inconsistency is the main argument for using the text presentation in anything that matters. You control what you paste, you do not control what they see, and a bio that relies on a specific drawing will not survive the trip.

There is one exception. In a group chat where everyone is on the same platform, the coloured tiles read better at small sizes than the thin glyphs, because the purple background gives them contrast. Context decides it.

Where to find more

The symbols hub sorts every set by type, with alchemy symbols and runes being the closest neighbours to this one if you are building something esoteric. For the emoji side rather than the glyph side, the galaxy combos and stargazing sets cover the celestial aesthetic, and our heart symbols guide covers the same copy and paste territory for a different audience.