How to italicize text in Discord

Half of the fun of joining a text chat server in Discord is being able to embellish your text. Whether that’s italicizing it, bolding it, adding stickers, or including emojis, Discord gives you plenty of ways to get your meaning across through text. After all, how will your friends know what the punchline of your joke is if you don’t italicize it?

Related: How to underline text in Discord

Discord makes some text features, like emojis and stickers, easy to find, but some are a little more esoteric. It can be tricky at first to figure out how to italicize your message, especially since Discord doesn’t have a simple “italicize” button like Slack and some other chat platforms have. If you’re confused, we’ve compiled everything you need to know about italicizing text in this guide.

Here’s how to italicize text in Discord.

Discord italicization instructions

To italicize text in Discord, simply put one set of asterisks around the text you want to italicize. For example, if you wanted to italicize the words “Dot Esports,” you would put asterisks around them like this: *Dot Esports.* If done correctly, Discord will italicize the text before you send it, so you can see what it will look like when you send it. After sending the text, the asterisks will disappear, but the italicization will remain.

If you add two asterisks to the beginning and end of your text, the effect will change to bold. If you want to both bold and italicize your text, add three asterisks to the beginning and end of your text. Text that is both italicized and bolded now displays correctly on Discord mobile and desktop; previously, it only displayed correctly on desktop.

Related: How to bold text in Discord

Both the bold and italicized effects can be combined with the strikethrough effect, which is achieved by putting two of the tilde icon (~) at the beginning and end of your chosen text.