How to type Feminine Ordinal

ª 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 Lo, a letter without case. Scripts like Arabic and Hebrew have no upper and lower forms. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.

What happens to ª in a search box

ª is a superscript form: Unicode says it can be rewritten as a, one character. Anything that normalises text to NFKC before comparing it does exactly that, which is why ª pasted into a search field, a URL slug or a username can come back as a and match text that never contained ª at all. NFC, the form this site uses, leaves it alone.

What Unicode says about Feminine Ordinal

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

The code chart points from ª to modifier letter small a (U+1D43). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Feminine Ordinal looks nearly right but not quite.

How Feminine Ordinal behaves in software

ª 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 Feminine Ordinal

If ª arrives as ª

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