Old English Font Generator

The first three rows swap each letter for a Fraktur character from Unicode’s maths alphabets, where mathematicians use 𝔤 or 𝔭 as names for particular objects. Because each letter is its own character, the blackletter look survives being pasted into a bio, a game name or a caption. The last two rows keep ordinary letters and change the spelling the way printers and scribes once did.

Unicode has no Fraktur thorn, long s or digits, which is why those rows stay in plain letters and why digits stay as they are unless you switch on bold digits. Bold capitals echoes the way blackletter capitals are usually drawn heavier and more ornate than the small letters, and it is easier to read than all-bold text.

Old English is the language of England from about 450 to 1150, the language of Beowulf. Its scribes wrote in a rounded hand called insular minuscule. The only surviving manuscript of Beowulf, copied around the year 1000 and now in the British Library, looks nothing like the spiky lettering on a newspaper masthead.

That spiky style is blackletter, which grew out of the Gothic book hands of the 12th century, after the Old English period. It came to be called “Old English” because English printers used it for centuries, starting with William Caxton in the 1470s, and later typefounders sold blackletter faces under that name. The name stuck to the letters, not the language.

So this page changes how modern English looks; it does not translate it. Real Old English would use different words and grammar; even “the” had several forms, such as se, sēo and þæt, depending on the noun. The Þe olde row is the closest thing here to genuine old writing, because thorn really is an Old English letter.

Blackletter is a family, not one style. Unicode’s maths alphabet follows Fraktur, the German branch, which is why the letters have broken, angular curves rather than the stiff picket-fence look of the oldest Gothic type.

Fraktur stayed in everyday German use far longer than blackletter did anywhere else. It ended suddenly: a circular from Martin Bormann of 3 January 1941 declared it to be “Jewish letters” and ordered a switch to roman type, despite blackletter’s earlier promotion as a German script. That is why German signs and labels in Fraktur now look old-fashioned or nostalgic rather than official.

Old English had its own letter for the sound th: þ, called thorn, borrowed from runes. It stayed in use into the 1400s, by which time scribes often wrote it in a way that looked much like a y. The first printers in England used type made on the Continent, which had no thorn, so they set a y in its place. “Ye” in “Ye Olde Shoppe” was always pronounced “the”; it was never the old word ye, meaning you.

Worked example. “The Olde Shoppe” in the Þe olde row becomes “Þe Olde Shoppe”, which is how a scribe would have written the first word. A sign maker of 1900 would have written “Ye Olde Shoppe”, the printers’ stand-in. Every th becomes þ, so “with them” becomes “wiþ þem”. Old English also used ð (eth) for the same sound, mixing the two freely, and Icelandic still uses both today.

Thorn is an ordinary letter in Unicode, Þ U+00DE and þ U+00FE, part of the Latin-1 set since 1987, so almost every font has it and it copies and searches like any letter. That is the opposite of the Fraktur rows, where each letter is a special maths symbol.

Until about 1800, English printers used two forms of small s: the long ſ at the start and in the middle of words, and the round s at the end. To modern eyes ſ looks like an f without its crossbar, so old text seems to say “fong” for “song”. German Fraktur kept ſ until the 1940s.

Printers did not all follow the same rules, especially before b and k, so treat the row as a typical 18th-century style rather than the only correct one.

ſ is U+017F in Latin Extended-A. Most fonts include it, but it is a different letter from s, so a search for “Congress” will not find “Congreſs” unless the software folds the two together. Paste the text back into the box above to swap every ſ for s.

• Avoid all capitals. Blackletter capitals are ornate and were never meant to sit side by side; German typesetting tradition avoided setting Fraktur in all capitals. 𝕿𝕳𝕰 𝕺𝕷𝕯 𝕴𝕹𝕹 is much harder to read than 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕺𝖑𝖉 𝕴𝖓𝖓.
• Watch the look-alike capitals. Modern readers mix up 𝔄 and 𝔘, 𝔅 and 𝔙, and ℭ and 𝔈. Read a name back in the row before you use it, especially for a tattoo or a jersey.
• Keep it short. Blackletter works for a name, a heading or one line. For a paragraph, use it for the first word and leave the rest plain.
• Use a real font for print. Unicode Fraktur has no ligatures such as ch, ck and tz that Fraktur fonts join, and each app picks its own maths font to draw it. For a logo, poster or stencil, set your words in an installed font instead.