How to type Beamed Eighth Notes
To type Beamed Eighth Notes (♫), press Alt + 14 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or write ♫ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+266B directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 266b on Linux, or 266b then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Beamed Eighth Notes
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+266B
- Windows
- Alt + 14
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 14 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | N/A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ♫ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+266B | BEAMED EIGHTH NOTES |
Other symbols
Beamed Eighth Notes is not the only name it goes by. People look for ♫ as music notes and musical notes as well, and the search box on this site matches any of them, so you do not have to know which name Unicode chose.
♫ lives in the Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2600-U+26FF), weather, astrology, religion, games and a wide miscellany. Within Unicode it is classified as So, a symbol.
What Beamed Eighth Notes is used for
In mathematical notation ♫ is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\twonotes$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
What Unicode says about Beamed Eighth Notes
The standard recognises ♫ under another name as well: beamed quavers. That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
The code chart points from ♫ to beamed descending musical notes (U+1F39D) and multiple musical notes (U+1F3B6). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Beamed Eighth Notes looks nearly right but not quite.
How Beamed Eighth Notes behaves in software
♫ takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
Every way to write Beamed Eighth Notes
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+266B |
| Decimal | 9835 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 99 AB |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 6B |
| HTML entity | ♫ |
| HTML numeric | ♫ or ♫ |
| CSS | \266B |
| JavaScript | \u266B |
| Python | \u266B |
| URL-encoded | %E2%99%AB |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\twonotes$ |
| SVG | 266B.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ♫ arrives as ♫
One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 99 AB read as Windows-1252 gives exactly ♫. The text is intact and the damage is in the reading, so setting the reader to UTF-8 restores it and retyping does not. A rectangle instead of the mojibake means the opposite: the encoding is right and the font has no glyph at U+266B, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.