How to type Bullet Point

Bullet Point is not the only name it goes by: people look for • as dot too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.

• lives in the General Punctuation block (U+2000-U+206F), dashes, quotation marks, spaces and reference marks used across languages. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark.

What Bullet Point is used for

In mathematical notation • is a binary operator: it takes one operand on each side, and TeX sets a medium space either side of it so that the three parts read as a single expression rather than as three symbols in a row. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\smblkcircle$ 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 it is dot. That word is what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Bullet Point is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches it as well as the Unicode name.

What • gets confused with

• has lookalikes that are a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.

· (U+00B7) is the middle dot, half the size and used between words rather than in front of them.

● (U+25CF) is a black circle, a geometric shape that happens to look like an oversized bullet.

◦ (U+25E6) is the white bullet, which is what a nested list level usually wants.

What Unicode says about Bullet Point

The standard recognises • under another name as well: black small circle. That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.

The code chart points from • to Middle Dot, one dot leader (U+2024), bullet operator (U+2219), inverse bullet (U+25D8) and white bullet (U+25E6). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Bullet Point looks nearly right but not quite.

How Bullet Point 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.

Every way to write Bullet Point

Encodings and escapes for Bullet Point (•)

Form	Value
Codepoint	U+2022
Decimal	8226
UTF-8 bytes	E2 80 A2
UTF-16 bytes	20 22
HTML entity	•
HTML numeric	• or •
CSS	\2022
JavaScript	\u2022
Python	\u2022
URL-encoded	%E2%80%A2
LaTeX, in prose	\textbullet
LaTeX, in maths mode	$\smblkcircle$
SVG	2022.svg · PNG (SIL Open Font License)

If • arrives as •

One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 80 A2 read as Windows-1252 gives exactly •. 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+2022, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.