This page collects the Unicode facts behind every decorated game name, in one place, with the date each was checked. It covers how a name box counts length, the difference between a symbol and an emoji, which invisible characters last, what NFKC normalisation does to a styled name, why a name looks different on another phone, and where the rules on names come from. Other pages on PUBGNickname cite these facts rather than restating them.
What is the difference between a glyph and an emoji in a name box?
In storage terms, most decorative symbols take one UTF-16 code unit and every emoji takes two. UTF-16 is the encoding many apps and game clients use internally. Characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (U+0000 to U+FFFF) fit in one unit; everything above U+FFFF is stored as a surrogate pair of two units.
| Character | Code point | Plane | UTF-16 units | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ★ | U+2605 | BMP | 1 | Symbol |
| ꧁ | U+A9C1 | BMP | 1 | Javanese punctuation |
| 亗 | U+4E97 | BMP | 1 | CJK ideograph |
| 𝓛 | U+1D4DB | Supplementary | 2 | Mathematical letter |
| 𓆩 | U+131A9 | Supplementary | 2 | Egyptian hieroglyph |
| 🔥 | U+1F525 | Supplementary | 2 | Emoji |
Checked 14 September 2026 against the Unicode Character Database, version 13.0.
The consequence for names: a field that counts UTF-16 units fills up twice as fast with emoji, hieroglyph brackets or mathematical “font” letters as with ordinary symbols. It also explains why a field can accept ★ and refuse 🔥 — some input filters only allow characters from the BMP. The symbols most often used in names, with their planes, are listed in our nickname symbols reference.
How do game clients count name length?
There are three common ways to count a string, and they give different answers for the same name. Code points count Unicode characters; UTF-16 units count storage; grapheme clusters count what a person sees as one character.
| Name | What you see | Code points | UTF-16 units | UTF-8 bytes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Legend | 6 letters | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| 𝐋𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝 | 6 letters | 6 | 12 | 24 |
| L̶e̶g̶e̶n̶d̶ | 6 letters | 12 | 12 | 18 |
| ꧁༒Legend༒꧂ | 10 characters | 10 | 10 | 18 |
| 👍🏽 | 1 emoji | 2 | 4 | 8 |
| 🇮🇳 | 1 flag | 2 | 4 | 8 |
Neither Proxima Beta, which publishes PUBG Mobile, nor KRAFTON, which publishes Battlegrounds Mobile India, states the maximum length of a nickname or which of these methods its name field uses. No official source exists for a character limit, so any exact number you see quoted online is someone’s observation, not a rule. The counter on this site’s generator stops at 24 characters; that is the tool’s own limit.
Which invisible characters are durable and which collapse?
U+2800 BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK is the most durable blank character, because it is an ordinary symbol with no decomposition and is not default-ignorable. The other popular blanks are either letters or format characters that software is allowed to hide, or spaces that normalisation turns into an ordinary space.
| Code point | Name | Category | Default-ignorable | Decomposition | After NFKC | What it means for a name | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| U+2800 | Braille Pattern Blank | Symbol (So) | No | None | Stays U+2800 | The most durable blank: an ordinary symbol with nothing to normalise. | |
| U+3164 | Hangul Filler | Letter (Lo) | Yes | Compatibility → U+1160 | Becomes U+1160 | Survives letter-only filters, but NFKC swaps it for a different filler. | |
| U+FFA0 | Halfwidth Hangul Filler | Letter (Lo) | Yes | Narrow → U+3164 | Becomes U+1160 | Two steps from the filler above; changes under NFKC too. | |
| U+115F | Hangul Choseong Filler | Letter (Lo) | Yes | None | Stays U+115F | Stable under NFKC, but a default-ignorable letter many renderers hide completely. | |
| U+200B | Zero Width Space | Format (Cf) | Yes | None | Stays U+200B | A format character; systems that strip ignorable characters remove it. | |
| U+200C | Zero Width Non-Joiner | Format (Cf) | Yes | None | Stays U+200C | Format character used by some scripts; not a visible space. | |
| U+200D | Zero Width Joiner | Format (Cf) | Yes | None | Stays U+200D | Joins emoji sequences; on its own it shows nothing. | |
| U+180E | Mongolian Vowel Separator | Format (Cf) | Yes | None | Stays U+180E | Reclassified from a space to a format character in Unicode 6.3.0 (2013). | |
| U+00A0 | No-Break Space | Space (Zs) | No | No-break → U+0020 | Becomes an ordinary space | Visible as a normal space; NFKC turns it into U+0020. | |
| U+3000 | Ideographic Space | Space (Zs) | No | Wide → U+0020 | Becomes an ordinary space | A full-width space; NFKC turns it into U+0020. |
Two points need care. First, “default-ignorable” is a Unicode property meaning a renderer may show the character as nothing; it does not tell you whether a game will accept it. Second, the invisible characters that were once allowed inside identifiers have been narrowed over time: U+200C and U+200D were removed from identifiers in Unicode 15.0 under UAX #31 (our local data is version 13.0, so this line relies on the published report rather than our own check). No official source from the publishers of PUBG Mobile or BGMI says whether U+2800 or U+3164 is allowed in a nickname.
What does NFKC do to a stylish name?
NFKC, one of the four normalisation forms in UAX #15, replaces “compatibility” characters with the ordinary characters they are variants of, and then composes accents. Systems apply it to make text comparable — so that “𝐋𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝” and “Legend” count as the same name, for example.
| Before NFKC | After NFKC | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 𝕷𝖊𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖉 | Legend | Mathematical letters map to plain letters |
| Ｌｅｇｅｎｄ | Legend | Full-width forms map to ASCII |
| ᴸᵉᵍᵉⁿᵈ | Legend | Modifier (superscript) letters map to plain letters |
| Lᴇɢᴇɴᴅ | Lᴇɢᴇɴᴅ | Small capitals have no compatibility mapping |
| ▄︻デ══━一 | ▄【デ══━一 | U+FE3B is a vertical presentation form of 【 |
| ㅤ (U+3164) | U+1160 | Compatibility jamo maps to a conjoining jamo |
Across the 138 working style definitions in this site’s own name generator, 19 turn fully back into plain letters under NFKC and 58 are left looking exactly the same. The complete breakdown, style by style, is on our PUBG nickname fonts page. Whether PUBG Mobile or BGMI normalise names is not documented.
Why does the same name look different on another phone?
The characters in a name are stored identically everywhere; what differs is the font each device uses to draw them. If a phone has no font covering a character’s block, it shows an empty box instead.
- Missing font: rare blocks such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs or Medefaidrin are not covered by every system font, so 𓆩 or 𖹭 may appear as a box on an older phone.
- Different design: a mathematical Script letter like 𝓛 is drawn by the phone’s own maths or fallback font, so its weight and slant vary between brands.
- Emoji presentation: some characters, such as ☠ U+2620, can appear either as a plain symbol or as a colour emoji. A following U+FE0E asks for text style and U+FE0F for emoji style, but not every device honours the request.
- Flags: regional indicator letters only become a flag when two form a valid country code. The same two characters can show as a flag on one phone and as two boxed letters on another.
A box on one screen is therefore not proof that a name is broken. Pasting it into a messaging app on the same phone is a quick way to see whether the problem is the font.
Look-alike letters and confusables
Unicode contains letters from other scripts that are drawn exactly like Latin letters, and UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms, lists them as “confusables”. Cyrillic а (U+0430) and Latin a (U+0061) look the same but are different characters, so a name built from them is a different name that looks identical.
We compared letters pixel by pixel in two fonts and found 39 Latin letters with an identical twin; the list, and what it means for copying someone’s nickname, is in 39 letters that copy your PUBG name.
Where do the naming rules come from?
Rules on what a name may say come from each game’s publisher and are separate from Unicode, which only defines the characters. The publisher decides which names are unacceptable and what happens to them; the site you copy a name from has no say.
- BGMI’s Rules of Conduct allow an inappropriate nickname or clan name to be banned for up to 90 days, and allow the name to be changed without the player’s consent.
- PUBG Mobile’s published terms do not state a fixed number of days for a name penalty.
- Changing a name uses a Rename Card, once per day; the first card is free at Level 10.
These points are drawn from the publishers’ own rules as summarised on our PUBG and BGMI name rules and bans page, last reviewed 14 September 2026. Neither publisher provides a public list of permitted characters: that part is no official source.
A test kit for any name box
The quickest way to learn what a particular name field accepts is to paste one character from each group below and watch what it does. Each group isolates one of the facts on this page, so a refusal tells you which rule the field applies. The characters come from the decoration sets our tools use and are copied byte for byte.
1 · Symbols that take one UTF-16 unit
If a field refuses these, it is filtering by character type, not by length.
2 · Symbols that take two UTF-16 units
These are not emoji, but they sit above U+FFFF like emoji do. A field that takes group 1 and refuses group 2 is limited to the BMP.
3 · Emoji and emoji combinations
Two units per emoji, more for combinations with joiners or enclosing circles. ⚡︎ and ⚔ are included on purpose: they are BMP symbols that some phones draw as emoji.
4 · Kaomoji built only from BMP characters
Every character in these faces is inside the BMP, so any refusal is about length or a specific character, not the plane.
5 · Decorations that NFKC changes
Paste one, save, and compare. If the saved text differs, the field normalises input.
6 · One name, sixteen ways
The same four letters, built sixteen ways. The table shows why a field’s length limit can bite on some versions and not others.
| Version | Code points | UTF-16 units | After NFKC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nova | 4 | 4 | unchanged |
| 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐚 | 4 | 8 | Nova |
| 𝓝𝓸𝓿𝓪 | 4 | 8 | Nova |
| 𝕹𝖔𝖛𝖆 | 4 | 8 | Nova |
| ℕ𝕠𝕧𝕒 | 4 | 7 | Nova |
| Ｎｏｖａ | 4 | 4 | Nova |
| ⓃⓄⓋⒶ | 4 | 4 | NOVA |
| Nᴏᴠᴀ | 4 | 4 | unchanged |
| N̶o̶v̶a̶ | 8 | 8 | unchanged |
| N̲o̲v̲a̲ | 8 | 8 | unchanged |
| ★Nova★ | 6 | 6 | unchanged |
| ꧁Nova꧂ | 6 | 6 | unchanged |
| 𓆩Nova𓆪 | 6 | 8 | unchanged |
| Nova🔥 | 5 | 6 | unchanged |
| Nova⠀X | 6 | 6 | unchanged |
| ᴺᵒᵛᵃ | 4 | 4 | Nova |
How this page is checked
Every Unicode fact above is read from the Unicode Character Database, not from memory or other websites, and every table carries the date and data version. Character names, categories, decompositions, planes and the Default_Ignorable_Code_Point property come from UCD 13.0 files; normalisation results were produced by running the text through NFKC. Statements about the games are limited to what the publishers have stated, and wherever no official document exists the page says so in bold instead of guessing.
When a newer Unicode version or a game update changes one of these facts, this page is updated first and the change is recorded on the site changelog. For styling a name with these characters, start from the PUBGNickname generator.
