Discord Text Formatting

Discord formats messages with markdown: a few symbols typed around your text that the app turns into bold, italics, spoilers or a heading when you press Enter. The symbols never show once the message is sent, which is why nobody can tell how it was done, and why it is easy to forget which ones do what.

Bold, italic, underline and strikethrough

These four wrap a word or phrase, and they stack. Two asterisks make text bold, one makes it italic, and three make it both. Italics also work with single underscores, while double underscores mean underline, so _this_ and __this__ do different things. Tildes strike text through.

• ***bold italic*** gives both at once.
• __**bold underline**__ combines underline with any of the others: put the underscores on the outside.
• ~~**bold strikethrough**~~ works the same way.
• The markers must touch the text. ** bold **, with spaces inside, shows the asterisks instead of bold.

Headings, small text and quotes

These change a whole line, so they only work at the very start of one, followed by a space. # Heading is the largest size, ## is medium and ### is small. -# does the opposite and turns the line into small grey subtext, which is the easiest way to add a footnote or a quiet aside under a message.

A single > quotes one line. Three, >>> , quote everything after them to the end of the message, which saves adding an arrow to every line of a long reply.

Spoilers

Two vertical bars on each side, ||like this||, hide text behind a dark bar until someone clicks it. It is the polite way to talk about an ending or a puzzle answer in a busy channel. Images and files can be hidden the same way: when you upload one, choose the option to mark it as a spoiler before sending.

Code blocks and syntax highlighting

One backtick on each side, `like this`, shows a short piece of text in a monospace box. Three backticks on their own lines open and close a code block for anything longer. Inside either one, markdown is switched off, so it is also the way to show someone the raw symbols.

Write a language name straight after the opening three backticks and Discord colours the code: ```js, ```py or ```css, for example. ```diff is a handy one outside of programming: lines starting with + turn green and lines starting with - turn red.

Coloured text in Discord

Discord has no colour tag, but a code block marked ansi understands the colour codes terminals use. The catch is that each code begins with an invisible escape character that a keyboard cannot type, which is why most coloured text in servers is copied from somewhere. The builder above writes the block with the real character in it, so you only choose the text and the colour.

• Eight text colours are available: grey, red, green, yellow, blue, pink, cyan and white, plus bold and underline.
• It shows in colour on Discord's desktop app and in the browser. The mobile app has generally shown the same block as plain monospace text.
• Because it is a code block, it always appears inside a box, never in the middle of a normal sentence.

Lists, links and escaping a symbol

Start lines with - or * for a bulleted list, or 1. for a numbered one. A masked link, [link text](https://example.com), shows the words instead of the address.

To show a symbol as itself, put a backslash in front of it. \*not italic\* comes out with the asterisks visible, which is useful for prices, maths, or a name that genuinely contains an underscore.

Where Discord formatting does not work

Markdown is a message feature. Your username, display name and server nickname are shown exactly as typed, so asterisks stay asterisks. Usernames are stricter still and only accept lowercase letters, numbers, underscores and full stops.

Display names and nicknames do accept Unicode, though, and that is where styled text comes in. Characters like 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝, 𝒮𝒸𝓇𝒾𝓅𝓉 or 𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔠 are letters in their own right rather than formatting, so they survive in a name field. The Discord fonts generator makes them, and the tiny text generator does the same for small letters.