How to type Per Mille
To type Per Mille (‰), press Alt + 0137 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + Shift + R on Mac, or write ‰ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+2030 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2030 on Linux, or 2030 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Per Mille Sign
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2030
- Windows
- Alt + 0137
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0137 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + Shift + R | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ‰ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+2030 | PER MILLE SIGN |
Other math symbols
‰ lives in the General Punctuation block (U+2000-U+206F), dashes, quotation marks, spaces and reference marks used across languages. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark. Its bidirectional class makes it a European number terminator, so it sits beside a number without breaking its direction.
What Per Mille is used for
‰ belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it \textperthousand, after \usepackage{textcomp}, a text command, and there is no maths command for it at all: it is a sign that gets written down, not an operator that acts on anything. Putting it inside $...$ is how it comes out looking wrong.
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 mil, permil and permille. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Per Mille 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 Per Mille
The standard recognises ‰ under another name as well: permille, per thousand. 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 ‰ directly. Against U+2030 the code chart carries the note “Used, for example, in measures of blood alcohol content, salinity, etc.”. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.
The code chart points from ‰ to Percent Sign and arabic-indic per mille sign (U+0609). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Per Mille looks nearly right but not quite.
How Per Mille 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 Per Mille
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2030 |
| Decimal | 8240 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 80 B0 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 20 30 |
| HTML entity | ‰ |
| HTML numeric | ‰ or ‰ |
| CSS | \2030 |
| JavaScript | \u2030 |
| Python | \u2030 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%80%B0 |
| LaTeX, in prose | \textperthousand (needs \usepackage{textcomp}) |
| SVG | 2030.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ‰ arrives as ‰
Its three UTF-8 bytes E2 80 B0 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The text is undamaged; the reader has to be told it is UTF-8.