How to type Superscript One
To type Superscript One (¹), press Alt + 0185 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or write ¹ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00B9 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00b9 on Linux, or 00b9 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Superscript One
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00B9
- Windows
- Alt + 0185
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0185 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | N/A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ¹ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00B9 | SUPERSCRIPT ONE |
Symbols related to Superscript One
The Unicode code chart points from ¹ to ², ³ and ⁰.
Other math symbols
¹ lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as No, a number that is not a digit. Fractions and superscript digits sit here. Its bidirectional class makes it a European number.
What happens to ¹ in a search box
¹ is a superscript form: Unicode says it can be rewritten as 1, one character. Anything that normalises text to NFKC before comparing it does exactly that, which is why ¹ pasted into a search field, a URL slug or a username can come back as 1 and match text that never contained ¹ at all. NFC, the form this site uses, leaves it alone. Unicode also records its numeric value as 1, so software that asks a character what number it is gets 1 rather than an error.
What Unicode says about Superscript One
The code chart points from ¹ to Superscript Two, Superscript Three and Superscript Zero. These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Superscript One looks nearly right but not quite.
How Superscript One behaves in software
¹ 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.
Every way to write Superscript One
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00B9 |
| Decimal | 185 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C2 B9 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 B9 |
| HTML entity | ¹ |
| HTML numeric | ¹ or ¹ |
| CSS | \00B9 |
| JavaScript | \u00B9 |
| Python | \u00B9 |
| URL-encoded | %C2%B9 |
| SVG | 00B9.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ¹ arrives as ¹
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 B9 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+00B9.