keyboard symbols, math symbols, set theory symbols, etc.). If people find this site useful, I think I'll create a bunch of different 'quick-references' for various categories of symbols (e.g. You can then draw your symbol and then hover over the search results to find out their names. Just click the 'insert' menu, and then click 'Special Characters' in the drop-down menu that appears. If Shape Catcher doesn't help, you can also use a simular function in Google Docs. It'll give you a bunch of symbols on a search result page, and hopefully that helps you find the name of the symbols that you're thinking of. So here's a trick to help you if you're in that situation, or if you just can't find the symbol that you're after on this page: Visit, and simply draw your symbol onto the input area provided. So what this means is that if you type 'name of symbol ^', then Google only sees name of symbol - it completely misses the main part of your query! Hopefully Google will fix this up at some point, but rather than hold my breath, I figured I'd create a neat little 'quick reference' site in case it's handy for others.īut to make matters worse, sometimes you don't even have a copy of the symbol to paste it into Google (for example, you just saw your Math professor write it on the whiteboard). I imagine this is a holdover from the early days of search engines where text corpora where too large to handle in their raw form, and so words were aggressively 'stemmed' and tokenized to make the datasets computationally tractable. Names of symbols are often unusually hard to find, because (at least as of writing), Google ignores the symbols in your search query.

It also contains named symbols that are only on specific variants of the QWERTY keyboard (such as £, which doesn't occur on US keyboards) Material equivalence, If and only if, iff, Means the same asĪs you've probably noticed, the list contains basically all the symbols other than the letters and numbers on the average English keyboard.

Degrees symbol google docs mac