Square root sign

Square root symbol Square root √ is a mathematical text symbol (we will talk later about its meaning) that people had been texting from the times when ASCII encoding was developed. And you can type it right from your keyboard. I'll show you how to do it by using different techniques depending on your Operating System and tastes.

Maths
Σπ½
Maths Emoji
Text symbols

Maths of root

Square root grafic

Square root of some number "A" is a number "X" such that "X" multiplied by itself would be "A". Every positive number "A" has two square roots: positive and negative ±√a . Although the principal square root of a positive number is only one of its two square roots, the designation "the square root" is often used to refer to the principal square root. For positive "A", the principal square root can also be written in exponent notation, as A1/2.

But there are more roots than just square roots! We can say that the Nth root of a number "X" is a number "R" which, when raised to the power of "N", equals "X" and its denoted like Rⁿ = X. Also in case that those roots have a pair power (2, 4, 6...), thay would have 2 solutions, a positive and a negative one. And those with an unpair power (1, 3, 5...) would have only one positive solution.

I'll give you several examples of use for clearence.

Square root of 9 is ±3 (denoted like ±√9 = 3 ), because (±3)2 = 9 (3·3 = 9)
Fifth root of 34 is 2.024397... (denoted like ⁵√34 = 2.024397...), because 2.0243975 = 34

How to input square root symbol

Choose your system to find out.

Windows

Shift States

Configure your keyboard layout in Windows so that you can type all additional symbols you want as easy as any other text. Takes about 5-10 minutes to set things up, but you'll be typing like a boss. You can assign mathematical square root symbol √ and any other text characters to your keyboard using this technique.

Character Map

CharMap allows you to view and use all characters and symbols available in all fonts (some examples of fonts are "Arial", "Times New Roman", "Webdings") installed on your computer. You can input square root symbol using it.

Mac

Emoji on iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch)

Text Symbols with iPhone Emoji keyboard 📲
Text Symbols with iPhone Emoji keyboard 📲Simple and beautiful way to discover how to add a virtual keyboard for Emoji symbols visible as small pictures. The keyboard itself is preinstalled on your iOS device, so you don't have to download, or buy anything.

Keyboard viewer

Mac keyboard viewer window

You can make frequently used technical non-fancy symbols like "√ ∑ π ∞ ∆ ™ © æ £ ¢" and åccénted letters on Mac using [Option] key. I've compiled a list of shortcuts in my article and explained how to open keyboard viewer. You can also use your Keyboard Viewer as an alternative to my list.

[Option] + [V] produces √ square root sign.


Character Palette

Character Palette allows you to view and use all characters and symbols, including square root sign, available in all fonts (some examples of fonts are "Arial", "Times New Roman", "Webdings") installed on your computer.


Linux

From Keyboard

Unicode hex code Symbol
221A

There actually are 3 different ways to type symbols on Linux with a keyboard. But only third and fourth level chooser keys and unicode hex codes can produce mathematical square root text symbol.

Character map

Character map allows you to view and use all characters and symbols available in all fonts (some examples of fonts are "Arial", "Times New Roman", "Webdings") installed on your computer. It can also help you lookup Unicode codes for entering symbols with keyboard.

HTML code

Following is a list of HTML and JavaScript entities for square root symbol. In Javascript you should write like a = "this \u2669 symbol" if you want to include a special symbol in a string.

HTML entity JS entity Symbol
√ \u221a

Last update 4 years ago