Old English Font Generator: Gothic Letters to Copy and Paste

"Old English font" is the everyday name for blackletter: the heavy, angular script of medieval European manuscripts and of the first printed books, the Gutenberg Bible among them. You'll also see it called gothic, medieval, or fraktur, which is one specific style of blackletter.

The "Old English" name has little to do with the Old English language. It caught on through typefaces such as Old English Text, a long-time staple in word processors. Today the look shows up on newspaper nameplates, diplomas, tattoos, beer labels and band and streetwear logos, which is why so many people search for gothic letters to copy and paste.

Unicode, the standard every phone uses for text, includes two fraktur alphabets as real characters: Mathematical Fraktur and Mathematical Bold Fraktur (Unicode chart). The generator swaps each letter you type for its fraktur twin, so "Tattoo" becomes 𝔗𝔞𝔱𝔱𝔬𝔬 or 𝕿𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖔𝖔.

A few details worth knowing:

• Five thin capitals come from an older block. ℭ, ℌ, ℑ, ℜ and ℨ were encoded earlier in Letterlike Symbols, so on some phones they look slightly different from the letters around them. Bold Gothic has no such gaps.
• Numbers stay plain. Unicode has no fraktur digits, so 𝕰𝖘𝖙. 2024 keeps its ordinary numbers. That usually looks fine, and it keeps dates readable.
• Accented letters and emoji stay plain in every style.

Blackletter carries a lot of attitude, so it works best where that attitude fits.

• Bios: a single gothic line works well. Keep it short; Instagram bios cap at 150 characters (Instagram Help), and styled letters can count double.
• Display names: they paste in, but search matches plain letters, so a gothic name can be harder to find. Keep your plain name somewhere on your profile.
• Usernames: won't accept them. Instagram, X and TikTok handles only allow plain letters, numbers and a few symbols (Instagram Help, X Help, TikTok Support).
• Captions, comments and DMs: work. Style the hook, keep the rest plain.
• Hashtags: keep them plain. A gothic hashtag is a different string and won't join the same hashtag page.
• Print and tattoo stencils: use a real blackletter typeface in a design app. This tool is for text you paste into apps.

Blackletter is harder to read than ordinary letters, and the thin style even more so at small sizes. Stick to a name, a word or a short phrase, and use Bold Gothic when the text will be small on a phone screen.

Screen readers may read each fraktur letter by its long Unicode name, such as "mathematical fraktur capital T", or skip it (Scope), so never put essential details only in gothic. And because most fraktur letters sit outside Unicode's basic range, each of those is stored as two 16-bit code units (Unicode FAQ), which some character counters count as two.

Gothic text is ordinary text once you copy it, so it publishes exactly as you pasted it, including from a scheduler. ViralFarm lets you plan posts for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Threads, YouTube and X in one queue and calendar, then publishes them for you.

Each channel can have its own caption, so the styled version goes where it fits and a plain one goes everywhere else. ViralFarm can also turn a link, a topic or pasted text into carousel posts, on templates modeled after posts that went viral. There's a free plan, no credit card needed. See plans.