Discord is one of the most popular instant messaging platforms, with over 563 million registered users in January 2023. As an app, Discord focuses on text and voice-based communication, so it is constantly improving itself with features related to either text messaging or voice-based communication, like voice channels.
One of the earliest features Discord adopted was markdown - a markup language to give style to plain text, such as bold, italic, strikethrough, and more. But that’s not all - Discord’s markdown has received new features like hyperlinks, headers, bullet lists, numbered lists, and blockquotes - which we will teach you how to use in this guide.
Why Use Discord Formatting?
We mentioned that markdown was a markup language that was used to give style to plain text. For example, you can emphasize parts of your messages by making them bold. This will make your text more eye-catching and accessible than regular text - it can also help you get your message across even better. So, if you want to point out that Michael Jordan is still the best player of all time, you can do so by making parts of it bold.
These formattings can be utilized by surrounding your text with specific characters. For example, surrounding your text with two tildes (~) like ~~this~~ will make your text appear as strikethrough in Discord. Similarly, putting a number sign (#) and a space in front of your text will mark that line as an H1, the highest heading tag.
While bold formatting is the most commonly used method, it’s not the only one. Blockquotes, the focus of this guide, are an amazing way to reference texts, other messages, and more. Using blockquotes, you can simply make parts or the whole of your text stand out.
How to Blockquote in Discord
Blockquotes in Discord are line-based. This means that when you want to make a part of your message blockquote, you can do so line-by-line. A blockquote looks like this:
This is a blockquote
To make a blockquote in Discord is very simple, you just have to add a greater-than sign (>) and a space at the start of your line.
The image above is an example of how your blockquote should be formatted. But when you actually add the greater-than sign and the space at the start of your line, you’ll notice that Discord will automatically preview the blockquote:
If you’re on a desktop and you press enter while you’re in the blockquote line, you’ll send the message directly. If you want to insert a new line without breaking the blockquote, you should hit SHIFT + ENTER. Discord will also automatically create a new blockquoted line if you keep typing in the blockquote line.
When you send the message, the blockquote will be displayed as an indented line with a bar to the left of it. This is a universally recognized design of blockquotes, but you can also use it to emphasize parts or add notes to messages.
Another way of easily making blockquotes in Discord is to use the formatting popup. You might’ve noticed that a popup appears when you highlight a text, and it has five buttons that allow you to bold, italicize, strikethrough, quote, inline code, and spoiler texts, respectively.
Clicking on the quotation mark button (third from the right) will blockquote the highlighted line. We want to emphasize that even if you highlight a word in the middle of a line, clicking the blockquote button on the popup will make the entire line a blockquote.
If you have multiple lines of text that you want to blockquote, there’s a super cool feature that lets you do that with just a few clicks.
If you put three greater-than signs (>>>) and a space at the start of a line, you’ll see that the line you added the greater-than signs and all the lines below it will be blockquoted. This is especially useful in cases where you don’t have access to the formatting popup, like mobile devices or webhook websites.
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