How to type Cent Sign
To type Cent Sign (¢), press Alt + 0162 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + 4 on Mac, or write ¢ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00A2 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00a2 on Linux, or 00a2 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Cent Sign
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00A2
- Windows
- Alt + 0162
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0162 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + 4 | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ¢ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00A2 | CENT SIGN |
Other currency symbols
Cent Sign is not the only name it goes by: people look for ¢ as cents too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.
¢ 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 Sc, a currency symbol. Formatting libraries recognise it when rendering money. Its bidirectional class makes it a European number terminator, so it sits beside a number without breaking its direction.
What Cent Sign is used for
¢ belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it \textcent, after \usepackage{textcomp}, a text command, and there is no maths command for it at all: it is a sign that gets written down, not an operator that acts on anything. Putting it inside $...$ is how it comes out looking wrong.
What ¢ gets confused with
¢ has a twin that is a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.
¤ (U+00A4) is the generic currency sign, which stands for a currency the document does not name.
What Unicode says about Cent Sign
The code chart points from ¢ to latin small letter c with stroke (U+023C), mill sign (U+20A5), cedi sign (U+20B5) and musical symbol cut time (U+1D135). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Cent Sign looks nearly right but not quite.
How Cent Sign 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 Cent Sign
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00A2 |
| Decimal | 162 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C2 A2 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 A2 |
| HTML entity | ¢ |
| HTML numeric | ¢ or ¢ |
| CSS | \00A2 |
| JavaScript | \u00A2 |
| Python | \u00A2 |
| URL-encoded | %C2%A2 |
| LaTeX, in prose | \textcent (needs \usepackage{textcomp}) |
| SVG | 00A2.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ¢ arrives as ¢
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 A2 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+00A2.