symbol explained
Degree Symbol
Marks temperatures and angles: 21°C, 90°.
- Unicode
- U+00B0
- HTML entity
- °
Try Degree Symbol
Edit the text, then change the font and size.
The short answer
What does Degree Symbol mean?
Marks temperatures and angles: 21°C, 90°. Weather, recipes, geometry and coordinates.
Background
Where it comes from
The degree sign is Unicode U+00B0. It is distinct from the masculine ordinal indicator and from a superscript letter o, even though those characters can look similar in some fonts.
In conversation
How to use it
Weather, recipes, geometry and coordinates. Copy the character itself when you need plain text that can be searched, selected and pasted like a letter.
Realistic examples
Degree Symbol in a sentence
“21°C”
“Turn the dial 90°”
“59.91° N”
Tone & nuance
What it communicates
Neutral and technical. Its meaning comes from the number and unit beside it rather than from emotional tone.
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.
Masculine ordinal indicator
U+00BA
A Spanish and Portuguese abbreviation marker, as in 1º. Autocorrect substitutes it surprisingly often, and it is not a degree.
Ring operator
U+2218
A mathematical composition operator that sits on the baseline rather than raised.
Degree Celsius
U+2103
A single precomposed character for the whole unit. It exists, but ° followed by C is the more portable way to write it.
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+00B0 | 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 | \00B0 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{00B0} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %C2%B0 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Common questions
Degree Symbol FAQ
What does the degree symbol ° mean?
Marks temperatures and angles: 21°C, 90°. Weather, recipes, geometry and coordinates.
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+00B0. 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+00B0 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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