After wishing it into the ether for the past decade, there’s finally a way to bold in Discord without using Markdown. Now, when you select text, you can choose a few formatting options from a hover menu.
Take a moment to celebrate, and then we’ll look at how to bold in Discord using Markdown or the hover menu.
Table of contents:
How to bold in Discord using Markdown
Discord uses a simplified version of Markdown for formatting. To bold text, put it between two pairs of asterisks. Like **this**.
Do that, and press Enter or return. Your text will be bolded.
Easy, right?
How to bold in Discord with the shortcut menu
Discord also recently added a much-needed shortcut (for web and desktop users only): a hover menu.
Select the text you’d like to format, and a menu appears that lets you select bold, italics, strikethrough, quote, or inline code. You can even redact text so users will need to click on it to read it.
The hover menu doesn’t have all the formatting options available in Discord, and it’s not available on the mobile app yet. But if you’re using Discord on desktop and typing four asterisks will push you over the edge, it’s the quickest way to bold in Discord.
Other Discord text formatting
Italics and other formatting work similarly. Here are the most common formatting options in Discord using Markdown:
-
For italics, put text between a pair of single asterisks, as in
*italics*. -
For bold, put text between two pairs of asterisks, as in
**bold**. -
For bold italics, put text between two sets of three asterisks, as in
***bold italics***. -
For underline, put text between two pairs of underscores, like
__underline__. -
For strikethrough, put text between two pairs of tildes, as in
~~strikethrough~~. -
For
inline code, put text between backticks, as in`code`. -
For a block quote, put a greater-than symbol at the beginning of each line, as in
> quote.
Check out Discord’s formatting overview to learn more, including how to use code blocks when you need to avoid formatting entirely.
Related reading:
This article was originally published in May 2019 by Justin Pot. The most recent update was in June 2025.
