What ℥ means
It marks an ounce in old medical measure lists.
The apothecary ounce symbol appears in old pharmacy recipes and dispensing records. Its system also included the dram, scruple, grain, and pound.
Carolingian (early medieval European) medical recipes dated c.775–900 preserve varied abbreviations for weights and liquids. Later accounts connect related signs with Latin uncia (“ounce”), Greek measures, or scribal contractions, but establish no single origin.
A 2021 medication-safety recommendation called for metric-only dosing; ℥ is historical notation.
Do not use ℥ for a present-day medication dose; use the prescribed metric amount.
Don't confuse it with
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Questions people ask
1Why does ℥ 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.
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How to type or find ℥
- Search it as
- ounce symbol · apothecary ounce · oz symbol · pharmacy symbol
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
℥\2125Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.