The Complete Guide to WhatsApp Text Formatting

WhatsApp looks like a plain-text app, but it quietly supports a surprising amount of formatting. You can make words bold, italic, strikethrough, turn text into monospace, build proper bulleted and numbered lists, add block quotes, and drop in multi-line code blocks. Used well, formatting turns a wall of text into something people actually read.

This guide is the complete reference: every format WhatsApp supports, the exact characters to type, the mistakes that stop formatting from working, and how to combine styles. If you just want to write visually and copy the result, the MD2WA editor does the typing for you — but it helps to understand what is happening underneath.

The full formatting reference

Here is every text style WhatsApp supports and the exact syntax:

Style	Type this	You get
Bold	*text*	text
Italic	_text_	text
Strikethrough	~text~	text
Monospace (inline)	`text`	text
Bulleted list	- item	• item
Numbered list	1. item	1. item
Block quote	> text	a quoted line
Code block	three backticks around text	a fixed-width block

Notice the symbols are single characters. This is the number-one source of confusion for people coming from other apps: WhatsApp uses one asterisk for bold, not two.

Bold, italic, and strikethrough

The three inline styles are the ones you will use most:

• Bold — wrap the text in single asterisks: *important*. WhatsApp shows it as a heavier weight. Great for names, deadlines, and the one thing you want a reader to notice.
• Italic — wrap the text in underscores: _quietly_. Useful for emphasis, titles, or a softer tone.
• Strikethrough — wrap the text in tildes: ~old price~. Perfect for showing a change, like a discount or a cancelled time.

A common trap: the formatting characters must touch the words with no space between the symbol and the text. * hello * will not turn bold — it has to be *hello*. The symbols also need a word boundary around them, so mid*word*here may not format the way you expect.

Monospace and code blocks

For anything technical — a code snippet, a serial number, a tracking ID — monospace keeps characters from being "helpfully" autocorrected and lines them up neatly.

• Inline monospace uses backticks around a short string: `ABC-123`.
• A code block uses three backticks before and after a block of text, on their own lines. Everything inside is shown in a fixed-width font with its line breaks preserved, which makes it the only reliable way to keep precise spacing in WhatsApp.

For a deeper dive into these, see WhatsApp Italic, Strikethrough & Monospace: The Full Cheat Sheet.

Lists and quotes

Modern WhatsApp supports real lists:

• Start a line with - (or *) and a space for a bulleted list.
• Start a line with 1. and a space for a numbered list; WhatsApp continues the numbering automatically.
• Start a line with > for a block quote, which renders with a vertical bar on the left.

These are great for steps, options, and anything you would otherwise cram into one run-on sentence. We cover the edge cases in How to Make Bulleted & Numbered Lists in WhatsApp.

Combining formats

You can stack styles. Wrap text in both bold and italic and you get bold-italic:

*_Reminder_* → a bold, italic "Reminder".

Order does not matter much, but keep the symbols balanced — every opening symbol needs a matching closing one. If a message looks half-formatted, you almost always have a stray or missing symbol somewhere.

What WhatsApp does not support

It is just as important to know the limits:

• No underline. There is no underline syntax. (Some editors, including ours, let you underline visually, but it is dropped from the WhatsApp output.)
• No headings, colors, or font sizes. Markdown-style # headings do nothing in WhatsApp — they just show the literal #. This trips up anyone pasting from a document or an AI chatbot. See Markdown vs WhatsApp Formatting for the full comparison.
• No nested formatting inside code. Text inside backticks is shown literally.

Common mistakes

1. Using double asterisks. **bold** shows the asterisks; WhatsApp wants *bold*.
2. Spaces inside the symbols. _ italic _ will not work.
3. Pasting headings from a doc or chatbot. The # and ** come along for the ride and look broken.
4. Forgetting a closing symbol. One missing tilde and the rest of your message may format strangely.

The fast way: write visually, copy clean text

Memorizing symbols is fine for a quick bold word, but for longer messages it is faster to write in a normal editor and let a tool convert it. That is exactly what MD2WA does: type with familiar buttons (or paste from anywhere), preview the WhatsApp result live, and copy text that is already correctly formatted. You never have to count asterisks.

Frequently asked questions

Does formatting work in WhatsApp groups and channels? Yes. The same syntax works in one-to-one chats, groups, and Channels.

Will the person on the other end see the formatting? Yes, as long as they are on a reasonably recent version of WhatsApp. Very old versions may show the raw symbols.

Can I format the message I pre-fill in a wa.me link? You can include the symbols, but support varies by device. See WhatsApp Click-to-Chat Links (wa.me).

Once you know the eight building blocks above, WhatsApp formatting stops being mysterious. Bookmark this page as a reference — and when you have a longer message to send, let the editor handle the symbols for you.