How to type Left Parenthesis
( is Shift + 9, in the same place on US and UK keyboards. Alt + 40 on the numeric keypad produces it on any Windows layout, which is the way in when the keyboard in front of you has no key for it, and ( writes it in HTML. Its codepoint is U+0028.
Left Parenthesis
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+0028
- Windows
- Alt + 40
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 40 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| HTML | ( | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+0028 | LEFT PARENTHESIS |
Other punctuation symbols
Left Parenthesis is not the only name it goes by: people look for ( as bracket too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.
( lives in the Basic Latin block (U+0000-U+007F), the original ASCII set: the letters, digits and punctuation printed on a US keyboard. Within Unicode it is classified as Ps, an opening bracket. It expects a matching closing character.
What Left Parenthesis is used for
In mathematical notation ( is an opening delimiter: it pairs with a closing partner and grows to the height of whatever it encloses when the pair is written with \left and \right. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\lparen$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
What Unicode says about Left Parenthesis
The standard recognises ( under another name as well: opening parenthesis (1.0). That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
How Left Parenthesis 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. It is a mirrored character: in right-to-left text it is drawn reversed, so it keeps pointing at what it pointed at.
Every way to write Left Parenthesis
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+0028 |
| Decimal | 40 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 28 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 28 |
| HTML entity | ( |
| HTML numeric | ( or ( |
| CSS | \0028 |
| JavaScript | \u0028 |
| Python | \u0028 |
| URL-encoded | %28 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\lparen$ |
| SVG | 0028.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ( needs escaping
( is one byte in ASCII, in UTF-8 and in every code page in common use, so it never arrives corrupted. Its problem is the opposite one: it means something to the software reading it. In HTML it can be written (, in a URL it is %28, and inside a CSV field, a shell command or a regular expression it has to be quoted or escaped rather than typed plainly. That is also why ( is the character people substitute when the one they wanted will not type.