How to type Music Flat Sign
To type Music Flat Sign (♭), press Alt + 9837 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+266D directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 266d on Linux, or 266d then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Music Flat Sign
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+266D
- Windows
- Alt + 9837 needs regedit
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 9837 | Above 255, so Windows will not accept it as typed. Copy the character instead. |
| Mac | N/A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ♭ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+266D | MUSIC FLAT SIGN |
Symbols related to Music Flat Sign
These are filed under music in CLDR, the keyword list Unicode publishes alongside the names.
Other symbols
Music Flat Sign is not the only name it goes by: people look for ♭ as flat note too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.
♭ 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.
How to type ♭ in Microsoft Word
In Microsoft Word, type 266d and press Alt + X. Word reads the four characters before the cursor as a hex codepoint and replaces them, and pressing Alt + X again turns ♭ back into 266d, which is the quickest way to check what a character really is.
What Music Flat 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: $\flat$ 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 bemolle and note. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Music Flat Sign is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
How Music Flat 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 Music Flat Sign
How to type flat symbol on keyboard?
You can press Alt + 9837 on Windows, with Num Lock on and the digits typed on the numeric keypad. That produces ♭.
How to make a flat symbol in word?
In Word, type 266d and press Alt+X, which converts the codepoint you just typed into ♭. Insert › Symbol › More Symbols finds it by its Unicode name, MUSIC FLAT SIGN. Google Docs has no Alt+X, so use Alt + 9837 there, or Insert › Special characters and search the same name.
Every way to write Music Flat Sign
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+266D |
| Decimal | 9837 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 99 AD |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 6D |
| HTML entity | ♭ |
| HTML numeric | ♭ or ♭ |
| CSS | \266D |
| JavaScript | \u266D |
| Python | \u266D |
| URL-encoded | %E2%99%AD |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\flat$ |
| SVG | 266D.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ♭ arrives as â™
One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 99 AD read as Windows-1252 gives exactly â™. 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+266D, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.