What ℉ means
A temperature on the Fahrenheit scale, written as one character.
Fahrenheit is the everyday scale in the United States and a handful of other places; most of the world uses Celsius. Handy anchors: water freezes at 32 F and boils at 212 F at sea level, normal body temperature is around 98.6 F, and 70 F is a mild room. To convert, subtract 32 and multiply by 5/9: 86 F is 30 C.
The scale is named after Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, an instrument maker born in Danzig (now Gdańsk) and working in the Dutch Republic, who published it in 1724 along with his mercury thermometers.
Should I write ℉ or F?
Write F; ℉ is a compatibility leftover.
Unicode treats ℉ as equivalent to the two characters and F, and some software quietly swaps it for F when it tidies up text. It was encoded because some older systems, East Asian ones among them, stored it as one block, and their text had to convert without loss. Many style guides put a space after the number: 72 F.
Neutral and technical; the single character looks fine in tight labels but F is the standard everyday spelling.
Part of collections
Don't confuse it with
5
F Two characters, same meaning; the recommended everyday form.
ºF Uses the masculine ordinal º from Spanish and Portuguese, a common mistake for the degree sign °.
Combination ideas
6Worth knowing
- At 40 the two scales meet: 40 F is exactly 40 C.
- Kelvins take no degree sign at all: 300 K. Unicode even has a separate kelvin sign, K, but plain K is the recommended spelling.
Questions people ask
2Why does ℉ show as a box?
Usually your font or app lacks the character. Writing F avoids the problem, since nearly every font has the degree sign and F.
Is 100 ℉ hot?
Yes. 100 F is about 38 C: a scorching summer day, or in a person, a mild fever or close to one.
More like this
17
Collections with ℉
4
How to type or find ℉
- Also called
- Fahrenheit sign · degree F · degrees Fahrenheit
- Search it as
- ℉ · °F · Fahrenheit symbol · temperature symbol
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
℉\2109Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.