How to bold text in Discord online

How to Bold Text in Discord

While a great deal of things can be expressed over text alone, it helps to be able to provide a little emphasis here and there. Many people who are new to Discord-and some not so new-are surprised to learn that you can actually format your messages! Bold, italic, underline, and much more. In this post, we’re going to cover how to be bold with your messages.

How to Make Bold Text in Discord

To make bold text in Discord, you simply have to enclose your text in double asterisks, which is this little star-shaped * symbol. So, if you wanted to write a sentence with a bold word in it, it might look something like “This is a **bold** thing to say!”, and Discord would make the letters between the asterisks bold.

How To Type an Asterisk

For the vast majority of QWERTY keyboards, you will be able to get this symbol by holding down the shift key and pressing the number eight on the top row of numbers. If your keyboard has a standard number pad, you should also be able to find the asterisk along the top of the number pad, between the / and – symbols.

If for some reason, you can’t get an asterisk on your keyboard-perhaps you have no number pad and your eight key is broken-you can always copy the asterisk from somewhere else… such as this page!

Also, remember to put two asterisks at either side of your bold text, as a single asterisk will make the text *italic*, not **bold**. Incidentally, if you want to make your text italic and bold, you just need to use three asterisks instead of two.

What is Markdown Text?

The above method of making text bold is known as markdown text and is used for many things across the web, such as coding websites. We won’t go into lengthy detail about it here, but we thought a little explanation might help.

Essentially, markdown text works by enclosing text in markers that tell the application displaying the text how it should look. In Discord’s case, the available options are limited to things like bold and italic text, but in something like a web page, they can be coded to show entirely unique styles, from fonts to colors and everything in between.

Discord Markup Generators

Despite the relatively limited nature of Discord’s markup functionality, there is still a lot you can do with it, and it can soon become a little tiresome adding in the markup by hand. Fortunately, you can use a markup generator.

These are available all over the web, and allow you to format text like you would in a regular text processor, and then copy out the text with the proper Discord markup. Most of these have clear instructions on how to use them, but it’s fairly self-explanatory, and a great alternative if you’re not keen on typing in a dozen asterisks every time you send a message you want to add emphasis to.