How to type Masculine Ordinal
To type Masculine Ordinal (º), press Alt + 0186 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + 0 on Mac, or write º in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00BA directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00ba on Linux, or 00ba then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Masculine Ordinal Indicator
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00BA
- Windows
- Alt + 0186
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0186 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + 0 | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | º | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00BA | MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR |
Symbols related to Masculine Ordinal
The Unicode code chart points from º to ⁰ and №.
Other symbols
º 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 º in a search box
º is a superscript form: Unicode says it can be rewritten as o, one character. Anything that normalises text to NFKC before comparing it does exactly that, which is why º pasted into a search field, a URL slug or a username can come back as o and match text that never contained º at all. NFC, the form this site uses, leaves it alone.
What º gets confused with
Unicode's own confusables table, the one used to catch lookalike domain names, groups º with ⁰ (U+2070, Superscript Zero). They are separate characters that render close enough to be mistaken for one another, so a search or a string comparison will separate them where your eye will not. If Masculine Ordinal is not matching where you expect it to, one of these is the usual reason.
What Unicode says about Masculine Ordinal
Unicode annotates º directly. Against U+00BA 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 º to Superscript Zero, Numero Sign and modifier letter small o (U+1D52). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Masculine Ordinal looks nearly right but not quite.
How Masculine Ordinal behaves in software
º 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 Masculine Ordinal
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00BA |
| Decimal | 186 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C2 BA |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 BA |
| HTML entity | º |
| HTML numeric | º or º |
| CSS | \00BA |
| JavaScript | \u00BA |
| Python | \u00BA |
| URL-encoded | %C2%BA |
| SVG | 00BA.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If º arrives as º
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 BA 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+00BA.