Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources

Test for Unicode support in Web browsers

Alchemical Symbols

U+1F700 – U+1F77F   (128768–128895)

The Alchemical Symbols range was introduced with version 6.0.0 of the Unicode Standard, and is located in Plane 1 (the Supplementary Multilingual Plane). Windows XP and later versions support supplementary characters by default. In Windows 2000, you need to enable support for supplementary characters. These characters cannot easily be displayed in earlier versions of Windows.

Alchemical symbols have been used by alchemists, natural philosophers, chemists, and apothecaries since the 5th century C.E., and were originally developed by Greek, Syriac, and Egyptian writers. European writers later added further symbols. The symbols are still used in scholarly literature, in New Age texts, and in the gaming and graphics industries.

Firefox 3 can display these characters.

The characters that appear in the “Character” columns of the following table depend on the browser that you are using, the fonts installed on your computer, and the browser options you have chosen that determine the fonts used to display particular character sets, encodings or languages.

You can find some or all of the characters in this range in the Windows Unicode font Symbola.

If you are not familiar with the characters, you can check the characters displayed here with the graphical display at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F700.pdf.

Copyright © 2010 Alan Wood

The hexadecimal numbers and the character names in the above table are taken from the Unicode 6.0.0 Character Database, Copyright © 1991–2010 Unicode, Inc., as contained in UnicodeData.txt on the Unicode Web site (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) in October 2010.

Created 11th November 2010   Last updated 11th November 2010