How to type Black Spade
To type Black Spade (♠), press Alt + 6 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or write ♠ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+2660 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2660 on Linux, or 2660 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Black Spade Suit
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2660
- Windows
- Alt + 6
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 6 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | N/A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ♠ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+2660 | BLACK SPADE SUIT |
Symbols related to Black Spade
These are filed under card in CLDR, the keyword list Unicode publishes alongside the names.
Other symbols
Black Spade is not the only name it goes by: people look for ♠ as spades too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.
♠ lives in the Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2600-U+26FF), weather, astrology, religion, games and a wide miscellany. Within Unicode it is classified as So, a symbol.
What Black Spade is used for
In mathematical notation ♠ is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\spadesuit$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for ♠ in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are spade suit, card and game. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Black Spade is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
How Black Spade behaves in software
♠ is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
What people ask about Black Spade
What does the spade symbol mean?
♠ is BLACK SPADE SUIT, encoded at U+2660.
How to type spade symbol?
You can press Alt + 6 on Windows, with Num Lock on and the digits typed on the numeric keypad. That produces ♠.
Every way to write Black Spade
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2660 |
| Decimal | 9824 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 99 A0 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 60 |
| HTML entity | ♠ |
| HTML numeric | ♠ or ♠ |
| CSS | \2660 |
| JavaScript | \u2660 |
| Python | \u2660 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%99%A0 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\spadesuit$ |
| SVG | 2660.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ♠ arrives as â™
One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 99 A0 read as Windows-1252 gives exactly â™ . The text is intact and the damage is in the reading, so setting the reader to UTF-8 restores it and retyping does not. A rectangle instead of the mojibake means the opposite: the encoding is right and the font has no glyph at U+2660, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.