How to Format Text in Discord
Discord uses a simplified version of Markdown for text formatting. This means you can make your messages stand out with bold text, italics, underlines, and much more—all without any special tools. Just wrap your text with the right symbols, and Discord handles the rest.
Whether you're running a gaming server, managing a community, or just chatting with friends, knowing how to format text effectively can help you communicate more clearly and make important information pop.
Discord Text Formatting Basics
The most common Discord formatting options are easy to remember:
- Bold: Use double asterisks (**text**) to make text bold and attention-grabbing.
- Italic: Use single asterisks (*text*) or underscores (_text_) for emphasis — see the full Discord italics guide for the differences between the two.
- Underline: Use double underscores (__text__) to underline important text.
- Strikethrough: Use double tildes (~~text~~) to cross out text.
- Spoiler: Use double pipes (||text||) to hide spoilers until clicked.
Code Block Formatting
Single backticks wrap inline code, triple backticks open a multi-line block, and a language name after the opening backticks turns on syntax highlighting. Code blocks have enough depth — colour tricks, language keywords, mobile quirks — to need their own guide: see Discord code blocks, syntax highlighting and colored text.
Tips for Better Discord Messages
Here are some pro tips for using Discord text formatting effectively:
- Combine formats for maximum impact: ***bold and italic*** or __**underline and bold**__
- Use spoiler tags for plot discussions, answers to questions, or sensitive content
- Use headings (#, ##, ###) in longer messages to create visual hierarchy
- Quote others with > to clearly reference previous messages
- Use code blocks creatively for ASCII art or formatted announcements
Those three headings have a fourth sibling that goes the other way and is easy to miss: -# at the start of a line turns it into subtext — smaller and greyed out, the size Discord uses for footnotes, credits and disclaimers under an announcement. It only applies to the single line it opens, so a footer of three lines needs the marker three times. Because it has its own quirks, and because it stops working the moment you leave the message box, the full walkthrough lives on our small text with -# page, alongside the Unicode superscript and small caps letters you can use in a nickname where Markdown is stripped out.
Remember that formatting only works in regular messages—not in usernames, server names, or channel names. Also, some formatting may not display correctly on older Discord clients or third-party apps.
Symbols That Work Where Markdown Doesn't
That last limitation is why Unicode symbols matter on Discord. Markdown is stripped out of usernames, nicknames, server names and channel names — but Unicode characters are part of the text itself, so they survive everywhere Markdown fails. This is how people get decorated nicknames and channel names: a star sign glyph beside a nickname, ✧ around a display name, or a divider inside a channel title. The twelve sign glyphs, from ♈ to ♓, are on the zodiac symbols page and are one of the most common nickname decorations on personal and astrology servers.
The same logic applies inside messages. Discord's Markdown parser only reacts to *, _, ~, |, ` and >, so everything else passes through untouched. Operators such as ≥, ≠, ∞, √ and π go straight into a message or a pinned rules post without any escaping — handy for study servers and bot documentation, and all listed on the math symbols page. Watch only for the asterisk-like ∗ and the tilde-like ∼: they look similar to Markdown characters but are different code points, so Discord ignores them, which is exactly why they are useful as decoration.
Currency glyphs behave the same way and matter more than you would expect on Discord — trading, commission and giveaway servers write prices in channel topics and role names where bold and italics simply do not apply. ₹, ₩, €, £, ¥ and ₿ all render identically for every member on every platform, and are collected on the currency symbols page. One caveat: put a currency amount inside a ```diff block and a leading minus will colour the whole line red, which is a neat way to mark a price drop and an easy accident otherwise.