symbol explained
Copyright Symbol
Marks ownership of a creative work.
- Unicode
- U+00A9
- HTML entity
- ©
Try Copyright Symbol
Edit the text, then change the font and size.
The short answer
What does Copyright Symbol mean?
Marks ownership of a creative work. Footers, image credits and licence lines.
Background
Where it comes from
The copyright sign is Unicode U+00A9 and reached Unicode through Latin-1, so support is close to universal. Under the Berne Convention protection is automatic, which makes the symbol a notice of ownership rather than a condition for it.
In conversation
How to use it
Footers, image credits and licence lines. Copy the character itself when you need plain text that can be searched, selected and pasted like a letter.
Realistic examples
Copyright Symbol in a sentence
“© 2026 Slangary”
“Photograph © Ada Lindqvist”
“All rights reserved ©”
Tone & nuance
What it communicates
Formal and legal in register. In a site footer it is routine boilerplate; on an image credit it is a deliberate claim.
Easily confused
Characters that look like ©
These are separate characters. However similar they render, they sort, search and compare differently — which is why pasting the wrong one is so easy to miss.
Registered sign
U+00AE
Covers a registered trademark rather than a creative work, and claiming it without a registration misrepresents its status.
Sound recording copyright
U+2117
The equivalent for recordings rather than for the composition or the artwork.
Circled Latin capital C
U+24B8
A circled letter from the enclosed alphanumerics block. Visually close, but it carries no legal meaning at all.
For developers
© in code
Each value is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the symbol directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+00A9 | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | © | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | © | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \00A9 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{00A9} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %C2%A9 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Common questions
Copyright Symbol FAQ
What does the copyright symbol © mean?
Marks ownership of a creative work. Footers, image credits and licence lines.
How do I type ©?
The fastest way is the copy button on this page, which puts © on the clipboard on its own, without a label or a stray space. To insert it by hand, use the code point U+00A9. In HTML you can write © instead of pasting the character. Windows Character Map and the macOS Emoji & Symbols viewer both let you search for it by name.
Will © look the same everywhere?
© is plain text, not an image, so it takes on the font, size and colour of the words around it while keeping the code point U+00A9 wherever it is pasted. A font with limited coverage can substitute a different glyph or show an empty box, and some apps restyle certain symbols as coloured emoji, so preview it in the app and theme your readers will actually use.
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