How to type OE Ligature
To type OE Ligature (œ), press Alt + 0156 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + Q on Mac, or write œ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+0153 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 0153 on Linux, or 0153 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Latin Small Ligature Oe
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+0153
- Windows
- Alt + 0156
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0156 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + Q | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | œ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+0153 | LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE |
Other accents symbols
œ lives in the Latin Extended-A block (U+0100-U+017F), further accented letters for Central and Eastern European languages. Within Unicode it is classified as Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.
Its uppercase counterpart is Π(U+0152). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.
What Unicode says about OE Ligature
The standard recognises œ under another name as well: ethel (from Old English eðel). That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
Unicode annotates œ directly. Against U+0153 the code chart carries the note “French, IPA, Old Icelandic, Old English, ...”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.
The code chart points from œ to AE Ligature, latin letter small capital oe (U+0276), latin small letter turned oe (U+1D14), modifier letter small ligature oe (U+A7F9), latin small letter inverted oe (U+AB40) and latin small letter open oe (U+AB62). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when OE Ligature looks nearly right but not quite.
How OE Ligature behaves in software
œ 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 OE Ligature
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+0153 |
| Decimal | 339 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C5 93 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 01 53 |
| HTML entity | œ |
| HTML numeric | œ or œ |
| CSS | \0153 |
| JavaScript | \u0153 |
| Python | \u0153 |
| URL-encoded | %C5%93 |
| SVG | 0153.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If œ arrives as Å“
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C5 93 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+0153.