From blackletter to "Old English"
Blackletter, also called Gothic script, was the main book hand across much of Western Europe from about the 12th century, and Gutenberg printed his Bible in a blackletter type around 1455. Its German form, Fraktur, stayed in everyday use in Germany until the mid-20th century.
"Old English" is simply a popular name for this lettering in English-speaking countries. The Old English language, the language of Beowulf, was written in an older Insular script, not in blackletter. Today the style is linked with newspaper mastheads, diplomas, tattoo lettering and heavy metal logos.
Fraktur letters in Unicode
The generator uses the Mathematical Fraktur and Mathematical Bold Fraktur letters, which mathematicians use for objects such as Lie algebras (๐ค). Five regular capitals, โญ โ โ โ and โจ, were encoded earlier in the Letterlike Symbols block, where โ and โ mark the real and imaginary parts of a complex number. In some fonts these five look slightly different from the rest.
Bold Fraktur (๐ญ๐๐๐) has a complete alphabet plus bold digits, so it looks more even. Regular Fraktur has no digits, so numbers stay plain.
Tips for gothic text
Blackletter capitals are hard to tell apart: โ (I) and ๐ (J) are nearly twins, and a whole sentence in Fraktur is slow to read. Use it for a name, a title or one striking word, and keep the rest of your bio plain. Screen readers may read each letter as "mathematical fraktur" followed by the letter, so do not put essential information in it.
Pair gothic letters with a cross, swords or a crown for a medieval look. For softer calligraphy, the script styles here and the cursive text generator are easier to read.