This tutorial shows three ways to insert special characters in Microsoft Word:
Word’s special characters include twelve text characters, such as the en dash, that don’t appear on traditional keyboards and fifteen formatting characters, such as the nonbreaking hyphen, that affect text layout. The table below lists all twenty-seven special characters.
1. Em Dash | 10. Registered Symbol | 19. No-Width Optional Break |
2. En Dash | 11. Trademark | 20. No-Width Non Break |
3. Nonbreaking Hyphen | 12. Section Break | 21. Left-to-Right Mark |
4. Optional Hyphen | 13. Paragraph Break | 22. Right-to-Left Mark |
5. Em Space | 14. Ellipsis | 23. Left-to-Right Embedding |
6. En Space | 15. Single Opening Quote | 24. Right-to-Left Embedding |
7. 1/4 Em Space | 16. Single Closing Quote | 25. Left-to-Right Override |
8. Nonbreaking Space | 17. Double Opening Quote | 26. Right-to-Left Override |
9. Copyright Symbol | 18. Double Closing Quote | 27. Pop Directional Formatting |
Sep 03, 2017 Male symbol is alt 9794 Female symbol is alt 9792 Learn how to input the male and female symbol in Microsoft Word using the alt key with numpad. Skip navigation.
For a description of each character, visit “What Are Special Characters in Microsoft Word?”
If you want to insert accent marks (the extra marks that appear above and below letters) instead of special characters, visit “Three Ways to Insert Accent Marks in Microsoft Word.”
This tutorial is also available as a YouTube video showing all the steps in real time.
Watch more than fifty other videos about Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat on my YouTube channel.
The images below are from Word for Office 365, which is currently the same as Word 2019. The steps are the same for Word 2016 and similar for Word 2013 and Word 2010.
All twenty-seven special characters can be inserted using the Symbol dialog box. Can i transfer microsoft office 2011 from one mac to another.
1. Place your cursor where the special character should be inserted in your text.
2. Select the Insert tab in the ribbon.
3. Select Symbols in the Symbols group.
4. Select More Symbols in the drop-down menu.
5. Select the Special Characters tab in the Symbol dialog box.
6. Select the special character that you need from the Character menu.
7. Select the Insert button to insert the special character.
8. Select the Close button to close the Symbol dialog box.
Pro Tip: If the Symbol dialog box blocks your view of your newly inserted special character, left-click your mouse arrow on the uppermost area of the dialog box to grab it and then move it to a different location on your screen.
Thirteen special characters can be inserted with preset keyboard shortcuts.
Please note that the shortcuts shown below for the Double Opening Quote and Double Closing Quote are different than those shown in Word’s Symbol dialog box (which may be typos because they don’t function as intended).
1. Place your cursor where the special character should be inserted.
2. Select the appropriate key combination on your keyboard.
Em Dash: Alt + Ctrl + Num –
(Alt plus Ctrl plus the minus sign on the number pad)
En Dash: Ctrl + Num –
(Ctrl plus the minus sign on the number pad)
Nonbreaking Hyphen: Ctrl + Shift + _
(Ctrl plus Shift plus underscore)
Optional Hyphen: Ctrl + –
(Ctrl plus hyphen)
Nonbreaking Space: Ctrl + Shift + Spacebar
Copyright: Alt + Ctrl + C
Registered: Alt + Ctrl + R
Trademark: Alt + Ctrl + T
Please visit: for information on Licensing Terms.Unlock the full Microsoft Office experience with a qualifying Office 365 subscription for your phone, tablet, PC, and Mac.Office 365 annual subscriptions purchased from the app will be charged to your App Store account and will automatically renew within 24 hours prior to the end of the current subscription period unless auto-renewal is disabled beforehand. Free microsoft apps for mac.
Ellipsis: Alt + Ctrl + .
(Alt plus Ctrl plus period)
Single Opening Quote: Ctrl + `,`
(Ctrl plus two grave accents)
Single Closing Quote: Ctrl + ‘,’
(Ctrl plus two single quotation marks)
Double Opening Quote: Ctrl + ` , Shift + ‘
(Ctrl plus one grave accent followed by Shift plus one single quotation mark)
Double Closing Quote: Ctrl + ‘, Shift + ‘
(Ctrl plus one single quotation mark followed by Shift plus one single quotation mark)
Word’s preset AutoCorrect feature lets you insert the copyright symbol, trademark symbol, registered mark, and en dash by typing specific character strings into your text.
Trademark: (tm)
Copyright: (c)
Registered: (r)
En Dash: --
The en dash won’t appear automatically until you complete the next word or character string and then press the spacebar.
Pro Tips: Select Ctrl + Z to reject an autocorrected character. You can also customize Word’s autocorrect options in the Proofing section of the Word Options dialog box.
Further Reading:How to Find and Replace Special Characters in Microsoft Word
Emojis are the small icons used to show your expressions on chats and other applications. They are also referred as smileys or emoticons in general. Nowadays, using emojis is a common practice even on a formal office documents. On a Mac, the emojis and symbols are inserted on documents and other places using a tool called “Character Viewer”. In this article we will explain how to insert emojis and symbols in macOS using character viewer. Learn also how to insert emojis in Windows.
Open any applications like Pages, Numbers or Keynote on your Mac. Simply press “Control + Command + Space” keys. This will open the “Character Viewer” as shown below:
Viewing Character Viewer in Mac with Keyboard Shortcut
You can click on any of the emoji icons to insert on your document. The icons are categorized into large number of groups for the ease of use.
The small popup window is difficult to search for the icons. Click on the “Character Viewer” icon on the top right corner.
This will open the larger view of the character viewer like below:
Viewing Larger Character Viewer
If you feel difficult to look for the icon then use the search box to search for specific icon.
There are large number of categories available for you to look for.
These categories are shown in the right sidebar of the character viewer. The middle section shows the actual icons and the preview of the selected icon is shown in the left pane. For each selected icon, there are also related characters and font variation shows under the preview. You can also easily add the icons to your favorites for quick use.
When you add an icon using “Add to Favorites” button, there will be a new category created with the name “Favorites”. View all favorite icons under this category. Also the icons can be removed from favorite any point of time.
When you are inside the apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote, navigate to “Edit > Emoji & Symbols”. This will open the same character viewer and you can choose the icons to insert on your documents.
Double click on any of the icon you like to insert it in your document. Most of the smileys offer skin tone variations which can be seen when you click on the icon.
Choose any of the variation you want to insert, this will also change the icons in the character viewer to that skin tone. If you want to choose variation or go back to the default one then just click on the icon and hold for sometime to view the variations in popup like above picture.
Below are some of the example icons inserted using character viewer directly on the WordPress post editor.
😇😍 🤩 😜 🤓🤡👣🗣🐒🙊👧🏾🧑🏽🧒🏾👦🏿👩🏻🙇🏿♀️🙋🏽♂️👩👩👧👧🐈🍵🛰🚽🆑🇺🇸
Though character viewer works on most of the default Mac applications, it does not work on Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint on Mac. If you are using one of these Microsoft Office app then go to “Insert > Symbols” menu and use either “Symbol Browser…” or “Advanced Symbol…” option to insert clip art, symbols and special characters.
Symbol Browser for Microsoft Mac Apps
But there will be no smileys available in the symbol browser. So you should use keyboard shortcuts like : – ) to insert smileys.