Planet symbols

A planet symbol or planetary symbol is a graphical symbol used in astrology and astronomy to represent a classical planet (including the Sun and the Moon) or one of the modern planets. The symbols were also used in alchemy to represent the metals associated with the planets, and in calendars for their associated days. Most of the symbols originated in Greco-Roman astronomy; their modern forms developed in the 16th century.

The classical planets, their symbols, days and most commonly associated planetary metals are:

planet	Moon	Mercury	Venus	Sun	Mars	Jupiter	Saturn
symbol
unicode	☾	☿	♀︎	☉	♂︎	♃	♄
day	Monday	Wednesday	Friday	Sunday	Tuesday	Thursday	Saturday
metal	silver	quicksilver	copper	gold	iron	tin	lead

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) discourages the use of these symbols in modern journal articles, and their style manual proposes one- and two-letter abbreviations for the names of the planets for cases where planetary symbols might be used, such as in the headings of tables.^[1] The modern planets with their traditional symbols and IAU abbreviations are:

planet	Mercury	Venus	Earth	Mars	Jupiter	Saturn	Uranus	Neptune
symbol
initial (IAU)	Me H[a]	V	E	Ma M[a]	J	S	U	N

The symbols of Venus and Mars are also used to represent female and male in biology following a convention introduced by Carl Linnaeus in the 1750s.

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