How to type Trademark

Trademark is not the only name it goes by: people look for ™ as tm too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.

™ lives in the Letterlike Symbols block (U+2100-U+214F), characters built from letters, such as the numero and trademark signs. Within Unicode it is classified as So, a symbol.

What happens to ™ in a search box

™ is a superscript form: Unicode says it can be rewritten as TM, two separate characters. Anything that normalises text to NFKC before comparing it does exactly that, which is why ™ pasted into a search field, a URL slug or a username can come back as TM and match text that never contained ™ at all. NFC, the form this site uses, leaves it alone.

How to type ™ in Google Docs and on a phone

In Google Docs, Insert, then Special characters, then search for trade mark sign or paste 2122 into the codepoint box.

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 Trademark is used for

™ belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it \texttrademark, 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 it is trade mark. That word is what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Trademark is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches it as well as the Unicode name.

What ™ gets confused with

™ has a twin that is a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.

® (U+00AE) is the registered sign. The difference is not stylistic: ® is for a registered mark and ™ for an unregistered one, and using ® for a mark that is not registered is a false claim in most jurisdictions.

What Unicode says about Trademark

The code chart points from ™ to circled wz (U+1F12E). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Trademark looks nearly right but not quite.

How Trademark 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.

What people ask about Trademark

Every way to write Trademark

Encodings and escapes for Trademark (™)

Form	Value
Codepoint	U+2122
Decimal	8482
UTF-8 bytes	E2 84 A2
UTF-16 bytes	21 22
HTML entity	™
HTML numeric	™ or ™
CSS	\2122
JavaScript	\u2122
Python	\u2122
URL-encoded	%E2%84%A2
LaTeX, in prose	\texttrademark
SVG	2122.svg · PNG (SIL Open Font License)

If ™ 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 84 A2 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+2122, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.