WhatsApp symbols and text formatting

The formatting marks WhatsApp reads

WhatsApp's Help Center lists the marks it turns into formatting: an underscore on both sides of the text for italic, an asterisk for bold, a tilde for strikethrough, three backticks for monospace and a single backtick for inline code. A line that starts with an asterisk or a hyphen and a space becomes a bulleted list, a number, full stop and space starts a numbered list, and an angle bracket and space makes a quote.

On Android you can also tap and hold the text you have typed and choose the format from the menu. WhatsApp notes that formatting cannot be switched off.

Marks or styled letters

The marks are instructions to WhatsApp's chat window; paste the same text into another app and the asterisks and underscores stay as they are. The styles in the generator below are Unicode characters instead, so they keep their look wherever you paste them, including your name and your About, where the marks do nothing.