How to type Sun
To type Sun (☼), press Alt + 15 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+263C directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 263c on Linux, or 263c then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
White Sun With Rays
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+263C
- Windows
- Alt + 15
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 15 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | N/A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ☼ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+263C | WHITE SUN WITH RAYS |
Other symbols
Sun is not the only name it goes by. People look for ☼ as sunshine and sunny as well, and the search box on this site matches any of them, so you do not have to know which name Unicode chose.
☼ 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.
How to type ☼ on a phone
On a phone, neither iOS nor Android has a codepoint route. Copy ☼ from this page once, then add it as a text replacement (Settings, General, Keyboard on iOS) so a short abbreviation expands to it from then on.
What Sun 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: $\sun$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
What Unicode says about Sun
The standard recognises ☼ under another name as well: compass. 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 sun (U+2609), sun with face (U+1F31E), white sun (U+1F323) and high brightness symbol (U+1F506). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Sun looks nearly right but not quite.
How Sun behaves in software
☼ takes one column in a terminal. 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.
What people ask about Sun
What does the sun icon mean on iphone?
☼ is WHITE SUN WITH RAYS, encoded at U+263C. It is distinct from sun (U+2609) and sun with face (U+1F31E), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
How to type a sun symbol?
You can press Alt + 15 on Windows, with Num Lock on and the digits typed on the numeric keypad. That produces ☼.
Every way to write Sun
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+263C |
| Decimal | 9788 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 98 BC |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 3C |
| HTML entity | ☼ |
| HTML numeric | ☼ or ☼ |
| CSS | \263C |
| JavaScript | \u263C |
| Python | \u263C |
| URL-encoded | %E2%98%BC |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\sun$ |
| SVG | 263C.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 98 BC 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+263C, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.