Degree & Unit Symbols

The degree symbol ° (U+00B0) marks temperature (21 °C), angles (90°) and geographic coordinates (48° 51′ N). It is one of the most searched symbols on the web, mostly because it is missing from standard keyboards.

Shortcuts: on Windows hold Alt and type 0176 on the numeric keypad; on a Mac press Option + Shift + 8; on an iPhone press and hold the 0 key and slide to °; on Android keyboards it sits on the second symbols page. In Word you can type 00B0 and press Alt + X. Look-alikes to avoid: ˚ (ring above, a diacritic), º (the masculine ordinal in Spanish 1º) and a superscript letter o. They look close but sort, search and read aloud differently.

Temperature symbols: degree Celsius ℃ and Fahrenheit ℉

Unicode has single-character ℃ (degree Celsius) and ℉ (degree Fahrenheit), inherited from East Asian character sets. They are handy where space is tight, but Unicode itself recommends writing the two characters ° + C or ° + F in normal text, because that is what search engines, screen readers and spell checkers expect.

Kelvin is written without a degree sign: 300 K, not 300 °K. The ° was dropped from kelvin by the General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1967. For a weather or temperature emoji, use 🌡️ thermometer; there is no separate degree emoji.

Unit symbols: micro µ, ohm Ω, angstrom Å, litre ℓ

µ is the micro sign (one millionth), as in µm, µg and µs. Ω is the ohm, the unit of electrical resistance; Å is the ångström (10⁻¹⁰ m), used for wavelengths and atomic sizes. Each also exists as a Greek or Latin letter, and Unicode treats the separate unit characters (ohm sign, angstrom sign) as equivalent to those letters, so either copies fine.

ℓ (script small l) is often used for litres to avoid confusing l with the digit 1, though the SI writes l or L. For area and volume, write m² and m³ with superscript digits, or use the single squared signs ㎡ ㎞ ㎏ ㎝ ㎜ ㏄, which come from Japanese typography and keep a unit in one character width.

Feet and inches, minutes and seconds: prime symbols ′ ″

Height and length in feet and inches are written with primes: 5′ 11″. The same ′ (prime) and ″ (double prime) mark arcminutes and arcseconds in coordinates (40° 26′ 46″ N) and minutes and seconds of time in some fields. They are slanted, unlike the straight typewriter apostrophe ' and quote " that most people type instead.

The percent family completes the set: % per hundred, ‰ per mille (per thousand, used for blood alcohol and salinity) and ‱ per ten thousand (the basis point in finance). ± gives tolerances such as 10 mm ± 0.2, ⌀ marks a diameter on technical drawings, and ℮ is the EU estimated sign printed next to the quantity on packaged goods.