Bullet

About this character

U+2022 BULLET is the small solid disc used as a list marker in running text and in unordered lists. It sits in the General Punctuation block alongside the em dash, en dash, ellipsis, and curly quotes — the standard equipment of contemporary typography. CSS uses U+2022 as the default value of list-style-type: disc, so every plain <ul> in a browser is implicitly rendering a bullet at the start of each item.

Several other codepoints look superficially similar and are routinely mistaken for it. U+25CF BLACK CIRCLE is larger and intended for use as a geometric symbol rather than a list marker; substituting it produces oversized bullets in body text. U+2219 BULLET OPERATOR is a mathematical operator with the same shape but a different general category (Sm, Symbol Math) — meant for notation like the dot product, not list items. U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT is the typographic interpunct, smaller again, used in Catalan, between dictionary syllables, and as a visible space marker. The Greek U+0387 GREEK ANO TELEIA is canonically equivalent to U+00B7 but lives in the Greek block.

In word processors, the bullet character is what you get when you paste from a Microsoft Word bulleted list into a text editor — Word stores the bullet as U+2022 plus a tab. In HTML you almost never need to type it; <ul> handles the markers. When you do need it inline, the named entity • works in every browser and email client, and is short enough to type by hand. For semantic accuracy in mathematical writing, use U+2219 BULLET OPERATOR; for a row of decorative dots, use U+22C5 ⋅ DOT OPERATOR or the appropriate punctuation.

From the Unicode data

Its East Asian Width is Ambiguous: it takes one column in Western contexts and two in East Asian legacy contexts, a common cause of misaligned tables in terminals.