Math Alt Codes

Mathematical operators and relations with Windows Alt codes, from the basic plus-minus, multiplication and division signs through to comparison and set notation.

This group holds 75 characters. They are scattered from U+0025 to U+22A5, 8,833 codepoints apart, because they were added to Unicode at different times and for different reasons. They are drawn from Mathematical Operators (37), Superscripts and Subscripts (18), Latin-1 Supplement (8), General Punctuation (6) in the Unicode Standard, which is what decides how each one is encoded and how software sorts and compares it.

Most of the traffic to this group is for °, √ and ≈. The phrase people type for the first of those is degree symbol, which is worth knowing if you are looking for it under another name.

Most of them, 37 of the 75, come from Mathematical Operators: the core set of mathematical and logical operators. A block is an address rather than a category, and this group is drawn from 5 of them. The rest come from Basic Latin, General Punctuation and Latin-1 Supplement among others.

20 of the 75 have a Windows Alt code that works as printed. The rest are copy and paste, which works the same everywhere.

Of the 75, 10 have a Mac shortcut of their own, and 2 can be written in HTML by name rather than by number. Everything else in this drawer is reached by copying it or by its codepoint, which works in every application on every system.

20 carry a numeric value, so software that asks what number a character is gets an answer rather than an error. 22 have a compatibility decomposition, which means NFKC normalisation rewrites it into something plainer and a search box may not return what was pasted into it.

Every character below copies with one click. Each one also has a guide page with its Windows, Mac and HTML route written out.

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