Gothic text, also called blackletter, Old English or fraktur, is the heavy, angular lettering of medieval manuscripts. You will know it from newspaper mastheads, beer labels, heavy metal band logos, gang-style tattoos and many gaming clan names. It looks dramatic, and 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰 is the kind of thing this tool produces.
Type your text to see two styles at once: regular gothic and bold gothic. Click to copy either one.
What you are getting
The Unicode standard contains a full fraktur alphabet, again in a regular weight and a bold weight. They were included for mathematics, where fraktur letters are used as variables, but they are real characters that you can paste anywhere that accepts text. This is not a font, so it does not matter what font the app uses: the shapes travel with the characters.
Capitals and lowercase letters are converted. Digits and punctuation have no gothic form and are left alone, which is why numbers in a gothic name may look out of place. A few of the capital letters live in a different section of Unicode from the rest, but you will not notice the difference.
Good uses
Display names, bios and captions where the look is part of the point: gaming tags, music and band pages, fantasy and tabletop game groups, Halloween posts, and the headings of a fan page. People also use the tool to try out a design before tattooing or engraving it. The result gives you a quick view of how a word looks in blackletter, but for anything permanent, take the text to an artist or typographer, since fraktur has its own rules about which letter forms are used where.
Readability and other limits
Blackletter is notoriously hard to read in more than a few words. The capitals in particular can be mistaken for one another, and even people used to the style read it more slowly. Keep it short: a name, not a paragraph.
Screen readers do not read these characters as letters. They tend to announce them as mathematical symbols, so a gothic name can be inaccessible to people who rely on one. Search is affected as well, as a search for “Bob” will not find “𝔅𝔬𝔟”. For anything that people need to find or understand, use plain text, and keep the gothic for decoration. The longer discussion in our article on when to avoid fancy text fonts covers the details.
Some platforms restrict special characters in usernames, though display names and bios are normally fine. If you like this style, you may also want cursive text, bold text, or the full set of styles in the fancy text generator.