15 January 2023

8 simple ‘Prohibited’ symbols for smoking, phones, kids and more in Word

Peter Deegan Fonts, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office for Mac, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Word, Office 2007, Office 2010, Office 2013, Office 2016, Office 2019, Office 2021 / Office LTSC, Office 365, Office for iPad Symbols & Emoji in Microsoft Office, Windows and Mac

Some ‘not allowed’ or ‘prohibited’ symbols, they can be used in Word, PowerPoint, Excel or Outlook. No Smoking, No Phone, No Children, No Drinking, No Pedestrians, No Bicycles, Not Drinkable Water or Mute.

The Unicode symbol list includes red circle with diagonal to stop, smoking, children under 18, Mobile Phones, Littering, Pedestrians, bicycles plus no sound and undrinkable water.

The same No Smoking and No Mobile Phone symbols/emoji in Windows (left) and Apple devices (right)

Like all emoji, they look quite different depending on the font and platform. The downside, for Windows users, is the emoji are a single color without the option of a black icon.

Here’s some examples with the Unicode Hex reference/codepoint and official Unicode name.

Plus samples in Segoe UI Emoji and Apple iOS for Mac, iPhone and iPad. For all these emoji, except one, the Segoe UI Emoji and Segoe UI Symbol versions are the same.

How to insert these symbols

The Hex reference (e.g U+1F6AD ) lets you quickly insert a symbol into Word using The Old Alt + X trick . In Word for Windows type the Hex code like 1F6AD then press Alt + X .

Or lookup the symbol via Insert | Symbol. Select the correct font such as Segoe UI Emoji, then type the Hex value into the Character Code box.

Windows 11/10 has the Emoji Panel (Win + . fullstop/period) but the search isn’t easy to use.

Word for Mac is a little harder. Insert | Symbol is very limited, in fact it sucks and Alt+X doesn’t work at all. The best option is using the MacOS Character Viewer (Ctrl + Apple + Space) and search for the symbol by name.