Instagram, TikTok, X, Discord usernames and plenty of other places let you type text but give you no way to bold it. People solve this by pasting in bold letters from a generator like this. The trick is that these letters are separate characters, not formatted ones, so the weight comes with them wherever they go: 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀.
Type your text and the tool shows six bold styles side by side. Click copy beside the one you like.
The styles
Bold serif has the look of a classic bold typeface, with the little feet on the letters. Bold sans is the cleaner, modern sans-serif version, which is the one that people reach for most for social media. Bold italic slants the letters as well. Bold script and bold gothic give you decorative lettering with some weight. Monospace is not bold at all, but a typewriter-style alphabet in which every letter takes the same width, which gives a coding or terminal look.
Capital and lowercase letters are covered by all six. Digits are available in bold serif, bold sans and monospace; the other three leave numbers unchanged.
When bold characters make sense
In a bio, to mark a heading or a keyword. In a caption, to put a title above the text. In a post on a platform with no formatting at all. In a message where you want one word to stand out. A little goes a long way: bold in every other word has the opposite effect and slows people down.
When they do not
These characters are visually bold but are not “bold” in the way a document is, so there are limits, and they are worth knowing before you use them somewhere important.
Screen readers and some text-to-speech tools handle them badly. Many announce each one as a mathematical symbol, such as “mathematical bold small a”, which makes the text very hard to follow for blind users. If the point of the text is to be understood, use plain text.
Search treats them as different characters. A bold-styled word will not match a search for the plain word, in social search or on the open web, so do not use them for keywords you want to be found by, product names, or anything that may be searched.
And some platforms and apps lack fonts for them, so a reader on an old device might see boxes. If your post matters, check how it looks.
If you use a platform that has its own bold markup, use that. It is more accessible and it will look right everywhere. For a wider range of looks, see the fancy text generator, and for small raised letters the small text generator. Our guide to how fancy text fonts work and when to avoid them goes through it in more depth, and if you need headline capitalisation rather than weight, try the title case converter.