How to type U with Circumflex
To type U with Circumflex (û), press Alt + 0251 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + I, U on Mac, or write û in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00FB directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00fb on Linux, or 00fb then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Latin Small Letter U With Circumflex
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00FB
- Windows
- Alt + 0251
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0251 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + I, U | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | û | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00FB | LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH CIRCUMFLEX |
Other accents symbols
û 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 Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.
û has a decomposed form: it can also be written as U+0075 Latin Small Letter U, U+0302 Combining Circumflex Accent. The two look identical and are not equal as strings, which is why a search for a word containing û sometimes fails against text that was typed on a different system. Everything on this site uses the single-codepoint (NFC) form shown here.
Its uppercase counterpart is Û (U+00DB). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.
Typing û without switching keyboard
û is the letter U carrying a circumflex accent, and it is needed in French and Portuguese. It is one character rather than two: a spell checker treats it as a letter of those alphabets, not as U with something added.
Both of the routes worth knowing compose the letter rather than looking it up. On a Mac press Option + I, let go, then press u: nothing appears until the second key, because the first one is a dead key waiting for a letter to sit under. On Windows the same idea needs the United States-International layout, which turns Shift + 6 into the same dead key. Add that layout once under Language and region, and û costs two keystrokes from then on rather than four digits on a numeric keypad.
How U with Circumflex behaves in software
û takes one column in a terminal. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.
Every way to write U with Circumflex
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00FB |
| Decimal | 251 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C3 BB |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 FB |
| HTML entity | û |
| HTML numeric | û or û |
| CSS | \00FB |
| JavaScript | \u00FB |
| Python | \u00FB |
| URL-encoded | %C3%BB |
| SVG | 00FB.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If û arrives as û
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 BB 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+00FB.