Tick & Cross Symbols

Where these characters come from

Check marks, crosses and ballot boxes come from Dingbats and Miscellaneous Symbols. The ballot box forms exist so that forms and checklists can be represented in plain text.

How reliably they render

Very reliable. Worth knowing that a tick means 'correct' in most of the world but has historically marked a wrong answer in parts of Northern Europe and in Japan, where a circle marks the right one.

Questions

Which tick to choose

There are three practical options and the difference is larger than it looks. ✓ (U+2713) is an ordinary text character: it takes your font's colour and weight and sits on the baseline like a letter. ✔ (U+2714) is the Dingbats heavy variant, noticeably bolder at the same size. ✅ is emoji — green artwork drawn by the platform, at emoji size, which will not match the colour or weight of anything around it. In a table or a bio the plain character usually sits better; the emoji is the right choice only when you actively want it to shout.

What an empty cell means in a comparison table

A lone tick is ambiguous by omission. If one column has a tick and the next has nothing, the blank could mean no, or not applicable, or that nobody filled it in, and the reader has no way to tell which. Pair every tick with an explicit cross, and add a text label as well, because a screen reader announces the character's name — 'check mark' — rather than the yes you meant by it. This is the most common accessibility failure in feature comparison tables, and it costs nothing to avoid.

Code points and HTML entities

More in Symbol & Emoji Library