How to type Quarter Note
To type Quarter Note (♩), press Alt + 9833 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+2669 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2669 on Linux, or 2669 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Quarter Note
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2669
- Windows
- Alt + 9833 needs regedit
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 9833 | 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+2669 | QUARTER NOTE |
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 So, a symbol.
What Quarter Note 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: $\quarternote$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
What Unicode says about Quarter Note
The standard recognises ♩ under another name as well: crotchet. 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 musical symbol quarter note (U+1D15F). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Quarter Note looks nearly right but not quite.
How Quarter Note 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 Quarter Note
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2669 |
| Decimal | 9833 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 99 A9 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 69 |
| HTML entity | ♩ |
| HTML numeric | ♩ or ♩ |
| CSS | \2669 |
| JavaScript | \u2669 |
| Python | \u2669 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%99%A9 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\quarternote$ |
| SVG | 2669.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 A9 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+2669, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.