How to type Male Sign
To type Male Sign (♂), press Alt + 11 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+2642 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2642 on Linux, or 2642 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Male Sign
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2642
- Windows
- Alt + 11
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 11 | 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+2642 | MALE SIGN |
Other symbols
♂ 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 Male Sign 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: $\male$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for ♂ in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and it is man. That word is what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Male Sign is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches it as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Male Sign
The standard recognises ♂ under other names as well: Mars, alchemical symbol for iron. Those are a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why they turn up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
The code chart points from ♂ to passed symbol (U+2BFD), man (U+1F468) and mens symbol (U+1F6B9). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Male Sign looks nearly right but not quite.
How Male Sign 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 Male Sign
Which symbol is used to label a male that expresses?
Unicode calls ♂ MALE SIGN, at U+2642.
What's the symbol for a male?
♂ is MALE SIGN, encoded at U+2642. It is distinct from passed symbol (U+2BFD) and man (U+1F468), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
Every way to write Male Sign
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2642 |
| Decimal | 9794 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 99 82 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 42 |
| HTML entity | ♂ |
| HTML numeric | ♂ or ♂ |
| CSS | \2642 |
| JavaScript | \u2642 |
| Python | \u2642 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%99%82 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\male$ |
| SVG | 2642.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 82 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+2642, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.