Symbol Reference

Degree Symbol (°)

Marks temperature, angles and geographic coordinates.

By The UltraTextGen Editorial TeamEditorial standards

Short answer

One character, U+00B0, covering temperature, angles and coordinates. Its most frequent failure is being confused with the masculine ordinal indicator º, which looks nearly identical at small sizes but is a different character.

Degree Symbol (°) — title card for the symbol reference article on UltraTextGen.

Where you'll actually meet it

Temperature is the everyday use, but the degree sign also marks angles, compass bearings and the degree component of latitude and longitude, where it is followed by minutes and seconds. A frequent error is substituting an apostrophe and a quotation mark for those two units; the correct characters are the prime and double prime, which are upright rather than curled and are separate code points.

Look-alike variants

℃ (U+2103) and ℉ (U+2109) are single characters combining the degree sign with a unit letter. They exist for compatibility with legacy encodings; writing the degree sign followed by C or F separately is generally preferred.

Correct usage

For temperature the degree sign sits between the number and the unit letter: 21 °C in SI style, or 21°C in most everyday writing. For angles and coordinates it attaches directly to the number: 45°.

A grid of 6 degree symbol (°) shown as individual copyable characters.

Questions

Is there a space before the degree sign?

In SI style, yes: 21 °C, with a non-breaking space between number and unit. Most everyday and journalistic style guides close it up as 21°C. For angles there is never a space — 45° — because the degree attaches directly to the number.

What is the difference between ° and the masculine ordinal º?

They are different characters that look similar at small sizes. The degree sign is a circle; the masculine ordinal indicator is a superscript o used in Spanish and Italian ordinals such as 1º. Substituting one for the other is a common encoding error.

Why a circle has 360 degrees

The division is Babylonian, and it survived because 360 is unusually cooperative: it divides evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, eighths, ninths, tenths and twelfths without leaving a remainder. That property is why the convention outlived the base-60 arithmetic it came from, and it is also why the sub-units are minutes and seconds of arc rather than decimal fractions — the same base-60 subdivision, carried forward twice.

The prime is not an apostrophe

Minutes and seconds of arc are marked with the prime ′ (U+2032) and double prime ″ (U+2033), which are upright and slightly slanted. Substituting an apostrophe and a double quotation mark is extremely common and wrong, and it gets worse rather than better in most editors: smart-quote substitution curls them into typographic quotes, which is immediately visible to anyone reading a chart, a survey or a set of coordinates. The same two prime characters mark feet and inches, so the error travels well beyond geography.

How to type it

Code point	`U+00B0`
HTML entity	`°`
Windows	Alt + 0176 on the numeric keypad
macOS	Option + Shift + 8
Linux	Ctrl + Shift + U, then 00B0, then Enter or Space

Infinity Symbol (∞)The lemniscate, introduced to mathematics in 1655.Math SymbolsOperators, relations, set notation and Greek letters used in maths.

Sources

Unicode Consortium — Code Charts
The official code charts for every block referenced here.

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