How to type Multiplication Sign

Multiplication Sign is not the only name it goes by: people look for × as times too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.

× 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 Sm, a mathematical symbol. Software may lay it out with the spacing an operator expects.

What Multiplication Sign is used for

In mathematical notation × is a binary operator: it takes one operand on each side, and TeX sets a medium space either side of it so that the three parts read as a single expression rather than as three symbols in a row. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\times$ 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 they are multiply and times. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Multiplication Sign 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.

x (U+0078) is the letter x. It is the substitution nearly everyone makes, and it is why a product description reads 10 x 20 rather than 10 × 20. The letter sits on the baseline and takes the width of a letter.

✕ (U+2715) is the multiplication x, a dingbat meant for close buttons and cancel marks rather than arithmetic.

· (U+00B7) is the middle dot, which is the other correct multiplication sign in several traditions.

What Unicode says about Multiplication Sign

The standard recognises × under another name as well: z notation Cartesian product. That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.

The code chart points from × to Heavy Ballot X, latin small letter x (U+0078), saltire (U+2613), multiplication x (U+2715), cross mark (U+274C) and vector or cross product (U+2A2F). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Multiplication Sign looks nearly right but not quite.

How Multiplication 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 Multiplication Sign

Every way to write Multiplication Sign

Encodings and escapes for Multiplication Sign (×)

Form	Value
Codepoint	U+00D7
Decimal	215
UTF-8 bytes	C3 97
UTF-16 bytes	00 D7
HTML entity	×
HTML numeric	× or ×
CSS	\00D7
JavaScript	\u00D7
Python	\u00D7
URL-encoded	%C3%97
LaTeX, in prose	\texttimes (needs \usepackage{textcomp})
LaTeX, in maths mode	$\times$
SVG	00D7.svg · PNG (SIL Open Font License)

If × arrives as ×

That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 97 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+00D7.