Insert any of the chess piece symbols available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office apps. King, Queen, Bishop, Knight. Rook and the lowly Pawn all with different looks, depending on the font plus three pieces available in Microsoft Office icons and the single chess piece emoji.
Chess Pieces – the full list
Here’s the full list of chess pieces available in Unicode plus the Pawn emoji along with their Hex code number to make them easier to find or use Alt + X in Word for Windows. Tip: the symbols in the left column can be selected and copied (Ctrl + C).
White Chess Pieces
Black Chess Symbols plus Pawn emoji
Segoe UI Symbol
The main Windows font for chess pieces is Segoe UI Symbol, which is the default font used in Office.
Arial Unicode MS
Alternatively, change to Arial Unicode MS for a different look.
Apple Symbols
On a Mac, the Apple Symbols font has all the chess pieces.
Use the macOS Character Viewer (Ctrl + Command + Spacebar) and search for ‘Chess’.
Chess Emoji symbol – pawn only
Only the Black Pawn is supported in the Emoji specification at a combined Hex U+265F, U+FE0F
All the other chess pieces are in the broader Unicode list but missing from the emoji font for both Windows and Mac. Here’s the two Black Pawn emoji in Windows (Segoe UI Emoji, left) and macOS (Apple Color Emoji, right).
As usual, the Apple design of the emoji is much better than Microsoft’s effort.
Use the Windows Emoji Panel or Mac Character Viewer to insert the chess pawn emoji.
Microsoft Icons
Icons in modern Office officially has two chess piece icons in the usual solid or outline versions. Insert | Icons and search for ‘chess’.
As with all icons, they can be recolored, shadow, 3D rotation, reflection, glow or other changes on the Graphics Format ribbon.
For some reason, the knight and rook symbols are combined into a single icon but you can split them in several ways. The easiest is to use Graphics Format | Crop to hide the unwanted piece.
Alternatively, use Graphics Format | Convert to Shape which changes the icon into an Office graphic with two separate freeform objects. See Better Icon, illustration or SVG editing trick in Office
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