How to type AE Ligature
To type AE Ligature (æ), press Alt + 0230 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + ' on Mac, or write æ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00E6 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00e6 on Linux, or 00e6 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Latin Small Letter Ae
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00E6
- Windows
- Alt + 0230
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0230 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + ' | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | æ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00E6 | LATIN SMALL LETTER AE |
Other accents symbols
æ lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.
Its uppercase counterpart is Æ (U+00C6). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.
What Unicode says about AE Ligature
The standard recognises æ under other names as well: latin small ligature ae (1.1), ash (from Old English æsc). Those are a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why they turn up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
Unicode annotates æ directly. Against U+00E6 the code chart carries the note “Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Old English, French, IPA”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.
The code chart points from æ to OE Ligature, cyrillic small ligature a ie (U+04D5), latin small letter turned ae (U+1D02) and latin small letter a reversed-schwa (U+AB31). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when AE Ligature looks nearly right but not quite.
How AE Ligature behaves in software
æ is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.
Every way to write AE Ligature
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00E6 |
| Decimal | 230 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C3 A6 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 E6 |
| HTML entity | æ |
| HTML numeric | æ or æ |
| CSS | \00E6 |
| JavaScript | \u00E6 |
| Python | \u00E6 |
| URL-encoded | %C3%A6 |
| SVG | 00E6.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If æ arrives as æ
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 A6 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00E6.