How to Bold Text in Discord: A Complete Guide

Whether you are trying to make an important announcement in a gaming server, highlight a key rule in a community channel, or just make your messages stand out to your friends, knowing how to format your text in Discord is a super useful skill.

The Quick Answer

To make text bold in Discord, all you need to do is place two asterisks (**) at the very beginning and two asterisks (**) at the very end of the word or phrase you want to emphasize.

• Type this: **Hello World!**
• Resulting output: Hello World!

Step-by-Step Examples

Let’s look at a few different ways you can use bold text in your chats:

1. Bolding a Single Word

If you want to emphasize just one word in a sentence, wrap only that word in double asterisks.

• Input: Please remember to bring your **potions** to the raid.
• Output: Please remember to bring your potions to the raid.

2. Bolding an Entire Sentence

You can bold whole sentences or paragraphs by placing the asterisks at the very start and the very end of the entire block of text.

• Input: **Meeting starts in five minutes!**
• Output: Meeting starts in five minutes!

3. Combining Bold with Other Formats

Discord also lets you mix and match formatting styles to make your text even more expressive:

• Italics: Use single asterisks (*text*) or single underscores (_text_). -> Italic text
• Bold and Italic: Use three asterisks (***text***) on both sides. -> Super important text
• Underline: Use double underscores (__text__). -> Underlined text

Troubleshooting Common Mistakes

Sometimes formatting doesn’t work quite the way you expect. Here is how to fix the most common issues:

• Spaces around asterisks: Make sure there are no spaces between your asterisks and the text.
  • ❌ Incorrect: ** hello ** (This will just show up as literal asterisks).
  • ✅ Correct: **hello**
• Accidental auto-formatting: If Discord isn’t letting your text display properly, check to make sure you didn’t accidentally include extra symbols or punctuation right next to the asterisks.

Now that you know how it works, head over to your favorite Discord server and try it out!