How to use Markdown in Discord — the full formatting guide
Discord supports a proper markdown subset: bold, italic, headings, lists, quotes, code blocks with syntax highlighting, spoilers and more. The complete syntax.
How to use Markdown in Discord
Discord has one of the better markdown implementations in any chat app – a genuine subset of the real thing, plus a couple of Discord-only extras.
The syntax
| You type | You get |
|---|---|
**bold** | bold |
*italic* or _italic_ | italic |
***bold italic*** | bold italic |
__underline__ | underline (Discord-only – real markdown doesn't do underline) |
~~strikethrough~~ | |
# ## ### | headings (three levels) |
- item | bulleted list (nest with 2 spaces) |
1. item | numbered list |
> quote / >>> quote | quote one line / everything after |
`code` | inline code |
```python | code block with syntax highlighting 🎉 |
||spoiler|| | click-to-reveal spoiler (Discord-only) |
-# small text | subtext (Discord-only) |
[title](url) | masked link (bots/embeds; in normal chat URLs just auto-link) |
The good stuff
- Code blocks with highlighting are the killer feature – name the language after the backticks (
js,python,rust…) and Discord colours it. Best-in-class for a chat app. - Headings and nested lists mean you can write genuinely structured posts – announcements, guides, rules pages – in plain markdown.
- It's close enough to standard markdown that notes drafted in Obsidian or generated by an AI paste in and mostly just work. That's the ecosystem effect in action.
The quirks
- No tables. (You can fake it in a code block with monospace alignment. We won't judge.)
__underline__means underline here but bold in some other markdown flavours – another dialect trap when copying between apps.- Headings only work at the start of a message line, and only in newer clients.
- Escaping: prefix with backslash (
\*not italic\*) when you need literal characters.
Beyond chat
Discord's markdown shows up in channel descriptions, event descriptions, and (via bots and webhooks) embeds – which accept the masked-link syntax and a bit more. If you run a community, your rules, FAQs and announcements can live as markdown files in a git repo and paste straight in. Written once, versioned, reusable – that's the markdown-based way.
More apps that speak markdown: the everywhere list 🌍
