How to type One Eighth
To type One Eighth (⅛), press Alt + 8539 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or write ⅛ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+215B directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 215b on Linux, or 215b then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Vulgar Fraction One Eighth
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+215B
- Windows
- Alt + 8539 needs regedit
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 8539 | Above 255, so Windows will not accept it as typed. Copy the character instead. |
| Mac | N/A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ⅛ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+215B | VULGAR FRACTION ONE EIGHTH |
Other fractions symbols
⅛ lives in the Number Forms block (U+2150-U+218F), fractions and Roman numerals as single characters. Within Unicode it is classified as No, a number that is not a digit. Fractions and superscript digits sit here.
What happens to ⅛ in a search box
⅛ is a precomposed fraction: Unicode says it can be rewritten as 1⁄8, three separate characters. Anything that normalises text to NFKC before comparing it does exactly that, which is why ⅛ pasted into a search field, a URL slug or a username can come back as 1⁄8 and match text that never contained ⅛ at all. NFC, the form this site uses, leaves it alone. Unicode also records its numeric value as 0.125, so software that asks a character what number it is gets 0.125 rather than an error.
How One Eighth behaves in software
⅛ 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 One Eighth
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+215B |
| Decimal | 8539 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 85 9B |
| UTF-16 bytes | 21 5B |
| HTML entity | ⅛ |
| HTML numeric | ⅛ or ⅛ |
| CSS | \215B |
| JavaScript | \u215B |
| Python | \u215B |
| URL-encoded | %E2%85%9B |
| SVG | 215B.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ⅛ 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 85 9B 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+215B, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.