How to Bold Text in Discord: A Complete Guide to Formatting Like a Pro

Whether you want to make an important announcement in your community server, emphasize a crucial point in a game strategy discussion, or just give your chat messages some extra flair, knowing how to style your text in Discord is a game-changer.

While Discord doesn’t feature a traditional floating formatting toolbar like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, it relies on a lightweight, intuitive system called Markdown.

This comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know about making your text bold, combining styles, and formatting like a pro.

1. The Basics: How to Bold Text

Making text bold in Discord is remarkably simple. You just need to wrap your desired words or sentences in asterisks ($ast$).

The Shortcut

• Method: Place two asterisks immediately before and after the text you want to bold, with no spaces between the asterisks and the letters.
• Syntax: **Your text here**

Example: Typing **Hello World!** will appear in chat as Hello World!

Note: If you only use one asterisk on each side (*like this*), Discord will format your text in italics instead.

2. Advanced Styling: Combining Bold with Other Formats

Once you master basic bolding, you can mix and match different Markdown symbols to create eye-catching text combinations.

Bold and Italicized (Bold-Italics)

Want maximum emphasis? You can make text both bold and italic at the same time by using three asterisks on each side.

• Syntax: ***Your text here***
• Result: This text will be bold and italicized

Bold and Underlined

To draw even more attention to a header or rule, combine bolding with underlines.

• Syntax: __**Your text here**__ (Two underscores on the outside, two asterisks on the inside)
• Result: This text will be bold and underlined

Bold and Strikethrough

Need to cross something out while keeping it readable? Combine bold with strikethroughs (tildes).

• Syntax: ~~**Your text here**~~
• Result: ~~This text will be bold and crossed out~~

3. Quick Reference Table for Discord Formatting

Here is a handy cheat sheet of the most popular text styles you can use alongside bolding in Discord:

| Style | Syntax | Example Input | Final Output |
| :— | :— | :— | :— |
| Bold | **text** | **Important** | Important |
| Italics | *text* or _text_ | *Emphasis* | Emphasis |
| Underline | __text__ | __Note__ | Note |
| ~~Strikethrough~~ | ~~text~~ | ~~Mistake~~ | ~~Mistake~~ |
| Inline Code | `text` | `print()` | print() |
| Spoiler Tag | ||text|| | ||Secret|| | ||Secret|| |

4. Troubleshooting Common Mistakes

If your bold text isn’t working the way you expect, check for these common pitfalls:

• Accidental Spaces: Placing a space between the asterisk and your text will break the formatting.
  • Incorrect: ** Hello ** (will just show asterisks in chat)
  • Correct: **Hello**
• Platform Quirks: Discord’s desktop and mobile apps support live-preview features on certain platforms, but if your formatting isn’t showing up as you type, make sure you haven’t accidentally triggered a typo in your symbols.
• Escaping Asterisks: If you actually want to type literal asterisks without triggering bold formatting, you can “escape” them by placing a backslash ($backslash$) right before them (