Turkish Symbols ☪︎
Tap a symbol to copy it — ay yıldız, the flag and Göktürk letters for a bio or display name.
Tip · press and hold to pick several at once
Crescent and star 12
Around a name 6
Crescent lines 4
Turkish flag emoji 8
Göktürk words 13
Göktürk alphabet 38
How to use Turkish symbols
☪︎ is a single Unicode character, STAR AND CRESCENT (U+262A), in the standard since version 1.1 in 1993. In Turkish it is called ay yıldız, “crescent-star”, and the flag is also known as al bayrak, “the red flag”. On the flag the crescent opens toward the free edge with the star in the opening: ☾⋆ keeps that direction, and ⋆☽ is the mirror image, ters ay yıldız. Any of the star symbols can go into the opening to make a pair of your own. Other Turkish characters live elsewhere on the site: the lira sign ₺ is with the currency symbols, and the letters ç ğ ı ş are among the Latin symbols.
The flag 🇹🇷 is not one character but two: the regional indicator letters T and R, which a phone joins into a flag. Windows draws no flag emoji, so there the pair shows up as the letters TR. Where the flag breaks — on Windows, or in a game name that refuses emoji — ☪︎ and ☾⋆ still work, because they are ordinary text; the nick frames on the skull symbols page go well with them. ☪︎ has an emoji form too, added in 2015, which iPhones draw as a purple square; this page copies the text form, so it stays the colour of your text. The blue bead 🧿, nazar boncuğu, has been an emoji since Unicode 11.0 in 2018, so it comes in colour like the flag.
Göktürk is the script of the 8th-century Orkhon inscriptions of Kül Tigin, Bilge Kağan and Tonyukuk. In Turkey its alphabet is counted as 38 letters, four of them vowels; Unicode has 73 Old Turkic letters: it also keeps the Yenisei variants and a few rare Orkhon forms. A few letters are pictures of a word: 𐰖 (ay, “moon”) looks like the moon, and 𐰸 (ok, “arrow”) like an arrow. Android 8 and newer, iPhone, Mac and Windows 10 and newer have a font for the script, and anything your device cannot draw is hidden from this page. Göktürk letters run from right to left, so every word on this page is read from its right edge. If a line in your bio starts with these letters, some apps start that line from the right too — put a word in Latin letters first, or use a symmetric frame like ☪︎ 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰜 ☪︎.
Questions
Why does the Turkish flag show as TR?
The flag is really two letters, T and R, and it is the device that turns them into a picture. Windows has no flag emoji, so it shows the letters as they are. Where the flag breaks, use ☪︎ or ☾⋆ instead — they are ordinary text characters and show up on phones and computers alike.
How do you write Türk in Göktürk letters?
𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰜 — t, ü, r and the letter for ük, read from the right edge. That is the spelling of the Kül Tigin inscription; the Tonyukuk inscription has 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰚, ending in k instead of ük. Both are in the words group above, with their reading underneath.
Why does my Göktürk text jump to the right?
The script runs from right to left, and some apps align a line that starts with one of its letters to the right as well. Start the line with a word in Latin letters and it stays on the left. For a Göktürk word on its own, use a symmetric frame like ☪︎ … ☪︎: even if the line moves, the frame reads the same from both ends.
How many letters are in the Göktürk alphabet?
38, four of them vowels — that is how the alphabet is counted in Turkey, and all 38 are on this page with their sounds. Unicode lists 73 Old Turkic letters: it also includes the variant forms of the Yenisei inscriptions and a few rare Orkhon letters.
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