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æ

latin small letter ae

Latin Small Letter Ae

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æ began as Latin’s ae ligature and became an Old English vowel letter. Today it is a regular letter in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese; the International Phonetic Alphabet, a sound-writing system, also uses it for a vowel.

Text symbol

What æ means

It can be a ligature or a separate letter.

Latin writers used æ as a ligature for ae in Roman inscriptions. Old English made it a vowel letter, calling it æsc (“ash tree”) after rune ᚫ; its shape came from Latin.

English spelling dropped this use by the 13th century; learned spellings revived æ in the 16th century. Danish had æ by the 1100s, likely via Old English.

Part of collections

é
Letters with Accents
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ə
IPA Phonetic Symbols
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Who writes æ

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Don't confuse it with

1

ae ae has two letters; æ is one character. Substitution depends on the language and word.

Questions people ask

1

Why does æ show as a box on some devices?

Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.

Collections with æ

1
𝔊Gothic Letters (Old English Text)120 symbols

How to type or find æ

Search it as
ash · ae ligature · Danish æ · IPA æ
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Windows (Word)
⎇Alt+XType 00E6, then AltX to get æ.
Windows
⊞Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win .).
macOS
⌃Control+⌘Command+␣SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “latin small letter ae”.
Linux
⎈Ctrl+⇧Shift+UType 00e6, then Enter or Space.
HTML
æ
CSS
\00E6
Microsoft Word
Microsoft lists this shortcut on 2026-10-08: CtrlShift&, release, then a; A gives Æ.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
æ
HTML hex
æ
CSS content
content: "\00E6";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%C3%A6
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
2
UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

1

Latin letters1,379 symbols

ABCDEFGHIJKL