How to Bold Text in Discord: A Complete Guide

Whether you are trying to make an important announcement in your gaming guild, highlight a crucial rule in a community server, or just emphasize a point in a casual chat with friends, knowing how to format your text in Discord is an essential skill.

While Discord doesn’t have a traditional word processor toolbar like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, it uses a lightweight markup language called Markdown. This allows you to format your messages using simple keyboard characters.

Here is everything you need to know about how to bold text in Discord, along with some helpful tips for combining styles and troubleshooting common mistakes.

The Short Answer: How to Bold

To make any text bold in Discord, place two asterisks (**) at the beginning and the end of the text you want to format, with no spaces between the asterisks and your words.

• Syntax: **Your text here**
• Result: Your text here

Step-by-Step Example:

1. Type ** in your chat box.
2. Immediately type the word or sentence you want to emphasize, such as Attention.
3. Close it with another ** without leaving any spaces.
4. Your input box will look like this: **Attention**
5. Press Enter to send, and it will appear as Attention.

Alternative Method: Using Underscores

Discord also supports an alternative syntax for bold text using underscores (_). To use underscores for bolding, you need to use two underscores on each side of your text.

• Syntax: __Your text here__
• Result: Your text here

⚠️ Note on Underscores: While __text__ works for bolding in Discord, single underscores (_text_) are used to create italics. Double underscores (__text__) are a reliable alternative if you prefer them over asterisks.

Advanced Formatting: Combining Bold with Other Styles

One of the best things about Discord’s Markdown support is that you can stack different formatting styles together to create headers, bullet points, or deeply stylized text.

1. Bold and Italicized (Bold-Italics)

Want your text to stand out even more? You can combine bold and italics by wrapping your text in three asterisks (***) on each side.

• Syntax: ***This text is bold and italicized***
• Result: This text is bold and italicized

2. Bold inside a Code Block

If you want to display text as code and have parts of it stand out, or if you want to prevent Discord from automatically parsing symbols, you can use code blocks (though standard Markdown behaves slightly differently inside code blocks, you can nest inline code with standard text). However, standard bolding inside a single backtick ( `) won’t parse—instead, use standard formatting outside or combine quotes as needed.

3. Bold Headers

If you want to create a bold section header (similar to a heading in an article), you can use the hashtag symbol (#) at the very beginning of a new line followed by a space. Header lines are automatically rendered in bold and larger text:

• Syntax: # This is a Heading 1
• Result:
  

  This is a Heading 1

You can scale headings down using more hashtags:

• ## Medium Header (Heading 2)
• ### Small Header (Heading 3)

Common Mistakes to Avoid

If your text isn’t turning bold and the asterisks are just showing up literally on screen, you are likely running into one of these common pitfalls:

1. Leaving spaces inside the markers:
   • ❌ Incorrect: ** Hello world ** (Spaces next to the asterisks break the formatting).
   • ✅ Correct: **Hello world**
2. Using the wrong number of symbols:
   • ❌ Incorrect: *Hello world* (Single asterisks make text italic, not bold).
   • ✅ Correct: **Hello world**
3. Typing on mobile with autocorrect:
   • Smartphone keyboards often automatically insert a space after punctuation marks or double symbols. Make sure your mobile keyboard doesn’t sneak a space between your asterisks and your words!

Summary Cheat Sheet

| Style | Syntax | Example Output |
| :— | :— | :— |
| Bold | **text** or __text__ | text |
| Italics | *text* or _text_ | text |
| Bold & Italic | ***text*** | text |
| ~~Strikethrough~~ | ~~text~~ | ~~text~~ |
| Header 1 | # text (start of line) | # text (large) |

Now that you know the tricks of the trade, you can make your Discord messages pop, organize your server announcements like a pro, and ensure your important messages never go unnoticed!