Degree Symbol

The one correct degree sign

The degree sign is ° (DEGREE SIGN, U+00B0). It has been available since the Latin-1 character set, so it exists in essentially every font on every device. It is used for temperature (25°C), for angles (90°), and for latitude and longitude (40° N). If you want a degree sign, this is the character, and everything else on this page is either a compatibility form or a mistake that looks right.

The mistakes are common because several characters look nearly the same at small sizes. People type º, ˚ or even a superscript o, and get away with it until a font or a screen reader reveals the difference.

The lookalikes

º is the most frequent substitute, especially for people who type it with the Alt code 0186 by accident, or Option and 0 on a Mac, which is next to the degree key combination. In many fonts, º is drawn with a slightly different shape from °, often a little taller and narrower, though in some fonts the two are nearly identical. The difference may be small enough that nobody spots it, but a search engine does not treat º as a degree, and a screen reader announces it as a masculine ordinal indicator.

˚ is the ring accent, and it is used by writers who think the ring is the degree mark. It is not, and in many fonts it is positioned higher than a true degree sign. ᵒ and ⁰ are superscripts, and ∘ is a maths operator. Using them in place of ° risks poor display and incorrect reading.

Celsius and Fahrenheit signs

Unicode includes ℃ (DEGREE CELSIUS, U+2103) and ℉ (DEGREE FAHRENHEIT, U+2109) as single characters. They were added for compatibility with East Asian character sets, where temperatures were encoded as one character. They decompose to the degree sign followed by C or F, and Unicode does not recommend them for new text. In practice, they often appear as a wider glyph than the surrounding text. The better form is ° followed by a normal letter.

The kelvin has no degree sign at all. The unit is written as K without a degree mark: 300 K, not 300°K. Unicode has a KELVIN SIGN (U+212A), and it too is a compatibility character, so use plain K.

Minutes and seconds

In geography and geometry, an angle can be written in degrees, minutes and seconds. The marks for minutes and seconds are ′ (PRIME, U+2032) and ″ (DOUBLE PRIME, U+2033), not the straight apostrophe and quotation mark that keyboards give you. The example 40° 26′ 46″ N uses all three. Typists often use ’ and “ because they are on the keyboard, and in most contexts that is acceptable, but the true prime marks are the typographically correct ones. ∠ (ANGLE) and ∡ (MEASURED ANGLE) mark an angle in geometry, and ⟂ (PERPENDICULAR) is the sign for a right-angled relationship.

Spacing and style

Style guides differ. The SI convention is a space between a number and °C or °F, as in 25 °C, and no space before the ° in an angle, as in 90°. Many newspapers and everyday writers write 25°C. If your audience is scientific, follow SI. If it is not, choose a style and be consistent. A non-breaking space keeps the number and the unit on the same line.

How to type the degree sign

1. Windows Alt code. Hold Alt and type 0176 on the numeric keypad.
2. Word. Type 00B0 and press Alt then X. Word also has Insert, Symbol.
3. Mac, US layout. Option and Shift and 8.
4. iPhone. On the number keyboard, press and hold the 0 key and slide to °.
5. Android. Open the symbols page.
6. HTML. ° or °.

For º, the Windows Alt code is 0186 and the Mac shortcut is Option and 0, which is how people end up with the wrong mark by mistake.

Accessibility and search

Screen readers announce ° as “degrees” in most contexts, so 25°C is spoken as “twenty-five degrees C” or “twenty-five degrees Celsius”. The lookalikes are announced as “masculine ordinal indicator”, “ring above” and so on, which can be confusing. Search engines treat the real degree sign as the standard, so a query for 25°C will not match a page that used º. Avoid decorative styles for temperatures, since fancy Unicode digits are not read as numbers. The fancy text accessibility guide gives more detail.

Related symbols

If the display shows boxes, see why fancy text shows boxes. The circle symbols page lists decorative rings, and the currency symbols and copyright and trademark symbols pages cover other practical marks.