Nearly every crescent moon you have copied off another site is one of three characters, and only two of them are moons. The third ⏾ is the icon a laptop puts on its sleep button. It is the prettiest of the three, it is the one that spreads fastest, and knowing what it actually is tells you exactly where it will fail.
Last updated: 4 September 2026 · COOLMOJI Editorial Team
90 moon symbols to copy
Grouped by how they read rather than by Unicode block. Tap any piece to copy it whole — the thin spacing marks that hold these sets together come with it, exactly as published.
Crescents on their own
Crescents with marks
Phases and full moons
Night sky and space sets
Three crescents, one of them not a moon
These four characters cover almost everything people mean by "moon symbol". Every name and code point below was read from the Unicode character database rather than taken from another symbol site.
| Character | Code point | Its actual Unicode name | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| ☽ | U+263D |
First Quarter Moon | |
| ☾ | U+263E |
Last Quarter Moon | |
| ⏾ | U+23FE |
Power Sleep Symbol | |
| 🌙 | U+1F319 |
Crescent Moon |
☽ and ☾ are the real pair. FIRST QUARTER MOON and LAST QUARTER MOON, encoded in Miscellaneous Symbols in 1993 for astronomy and astrology, which needed a way to write both halves of the cycle. They are mirror images of each other. They are text characters, so they take the colour of the text around them and scale with your font size — which is why a crescent in a bio can be the same soft grey as the words beside it.
⏾ is a power icon. POWER SLEEP SYMBOL, U+23FE, added to the Miscellaneous Technical block for exactly one job: labelling the sleep state on hardware. It has the cleanest, thinnest crescent shape of the three, which is why it took over aesthetic bios completely. Nobody who encoded it was thinking about the moon.
🌙 is emoji. CRESCENT MOON, U+1F319 — a picture drawn by the phone, in the phone’s own yellow. It ignores your text colour and it is the first of the four that a strict username field will reject.
The practical version: use ☽ or ☾ when the crescent must match the colour of your text, ⏾ when you want the thinnest possible line, and 🌙 when you want it loud and you do not control where it renders.
The eight phases, in the order Unicode put them
The phase emoji are not scattered. They run in one unbroken sequence from U+1F311 to U+1F318, and that sequence is the lunar cycle in order, which makes them the rare set of emoji you can lay out correctly without checking anything.
| Character | Code point | Its actual Unicode name | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🌑 | U+1F311 |
New Moon Symbol | |
| 🌒 | U+1F312 |
Waxing Crescent Moon Symbol | |
| 🌓 | U+1F313 |
First Quarter Moon Symbol | |
| 🌔 | U+1F314 |
Waxing Gibbous Moon Symbol | |
| 🌕 | U+1F315 |
Full Moon Symbol | |
| 🌖 | U+1F316 |
Waning Gibbous Moon Symbol | |
| 🌗 | U+1F317 |
Last Quarter Moon Symbol | |
| 🌘 | U+1F318 |
Waning Crescent Moon Symbol |
Two details people get wrong. The first is that the names describe the Northern Hemisphere view: a waxing moon is lit on the right, and readers south of the equator see the mirror of every glyph in that table. The second is that 🌑 is NEW MOON, which means the unlit moon — a dark disc, not a missing one. That is why it renders as a black circle and why it works as a joke about being unimpressed, which was never the intention.
The face moons 🌚 and 🌝 sit just outside that run, at U+1F31A and U+1F31D. They are not phases; they are the same discs with faces, encoded separately because Japanese carriers had shipped them that way.
Where moon symbols survive and where they break
Instagram and TikTok bios. Everything on this page works. This is the environment the long crescent sets were built for.
Usernames and display names. ☾ and ☽ usually pass because they are old text characters. 🌙 and the phase emoji are the ones that get stripped, sometimes without any warning — check the saved name, not the preview.
Games with name filters. The strictest case. The phase emoji all sit above the Basic Multilingual Plane and will usually be rejected outright. The text crescents are your only reliable option.
Older Android keyboards. ⏾ is the one to watch. It was added in 2014 and is still missing from some older system fonts, where it draws as an empty rectangle. If a set has to work everywhere, build it from ☾ instead.
Read aloud. A screen reader announces 🌙 as "crescent moon" every time it appears. One crescent reads as decoration; six read as a sentence nobody wanted. The same restraint we argue for in the text dividers guide applies here.
FAQ
Why is my moon yellow when the set looked white?
You copied 🌙, the emoji, which is painted by the phone in a fixed colour. Swap it for ☾, ☽ or ⏾ — those are text characters and take the colour of the text around them.
Which way should the crescent face?
Whichever way looks right beside your text; there is no rule outside astronomy. If you want the pair to read as a matched frame, use ☽ on one side and ☾ on the other so the shapes mirror rather than repeat.
Why does my crescent show as an empty box?
The font on that device has no glyph for it. This happens most often with ⏾, which is newer than the other three. ☾ and ☽ have been in fonts since the 1990s and are far safer.
What is the difference between ☾ and ⏾?
☾ is an astronomical symbol, a text character that inherits your colour. ⏾ is a power-management icon that happens to be crescent-shaped. Visually ⏾ is thinner and more even; that is the whole reason it spread.
Can I put a moon in a hashtag?
You can type it, but it will not help anyone find you, and on most platforms the symbol ends the hashtag rather than joining it. Keep symbols out of the words you want searched — the point we make at length in our Unicode names guide.
