How to type Degree Symbol

Degree Symbol is not the only name it goes by. People look for ° as degrees, celsius and fahrenheit 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 Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as So, a symbol. Its bidirectional class makes it a European number terminator, so it sits beside a number without breaking its direction.

What Degree Symbol is used for

° belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it \textdegree, 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.

Unicode publishes a second list of names for ° in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are hour and proof. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Degree Symbol is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.

What ° gets confused with

° has lookalikes that are a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.

º (U+00BA) is the masculine ordinal, the one Spanish and Portuguese use in 1º and 2º. It is a raised letter o rather than a ring, and a temperature written with it reads as an abbreviation to anything that parses the text.

⁰ (U+2070) is superscript zero, which is a digit. It is narrower, and it sorts with the numbers.

What Unicode says about Degree Symbol

Unicode annotates ° directly. Against U+00B0 the code chart carries the note “This is a spacing character”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.

The code chart points from ° to Superscript Zero, ring above (U+02DA), combining ring above (U+030A), degree celsius (U+2103), degree fahrenheit (U+2109) and ring operator (U+2218). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Degree Symbol looks nearly right but not quite.

How Degree Symbol behaves in software

° 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 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.

What people ask about Degree Symbol

Every way to write Degree Symbol

Encodings and escapes for Degree Symbol (°)

Form	Value
Codepoint	U+00B0
Decimal	176
UTF-8 bytes	C2 B0
UTF-16 bytes	00 B0
HTML entity	°
HTML numeric	° or °
CSS	\00B0
JavaScript	\u00B0
Python	\u00B0
URL-encoded	%C2%B0
LaTeX, in prose	\textdegree (needs \usepackage{textcomp})
SVG	00B0.svg · PNG (SIL Open Font License)

If ° arrives as °

That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 B0 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+00B0.