How to type Music Sharp Sign
To type Music Sharp Sign (♯), press Alt + 9839 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+266F directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 266f on Linux, or 266f then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Music Sharp Sign
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+266F
- Windows
- Alt + 9839 needs regedit
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 9839 | 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+266F | MUSIC SHARP SIGN |
Symbols related to Music Sharp Sign
The Unicode code chart points from ♯ to #, and the rest are filed under music in CLDR, the keyword list Unicode publishes alongside the names.
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 Sm, a mathematical symbol. Software may lay it out with the spacing an operator expects.
What Music Sharp 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: $\sharp$ 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 dièse, diesis and note. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Music Sharp 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 Unicode says about Music Sharp Sign
The standard recognises ♯ under another name as well: z notation infix bag count. 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 Number Sign. These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Music Sharp Sign looks nearly right but not quite.
How Music Sharp 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.
Every way to write Music Sharp Sign
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+266F |
| Decimal | 9839 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 99 AF |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 6F |
| HTML entity | ♯ |
| HTML numeric | ♯ or ♯ |
| CSS | \266F |
| JavaScript | \u266F |
| Python | \u266F |
| URL-encoded | %E2%99%AF |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\sharp$ |
| SVG | 266F.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 AF 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+266F, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.