Currency & Units Symbols - Alt Codes & Unicode

This table covers the symbols that appear constantly in commercial and technical writing: major currency signs, the degree symbol and its temperature forms, the basic arithmetic operators, and the intellectual property marks. They are the characters most often approximated badly, and each approximation causes a specific, predictable problem.

Currency symbols carry placement conventions that differ by locale, and getting them wrong marks text as machine-translated. English writes £50 and $50 with the symbol first and no space. French writes 50 € with the symbol after and a non-breaking space before it. German writes 50 €. Most currencies also have a three-letter ISO code — EUR, GBP, JPY, INR, RUB, KRW, VND — and in financial or international contexts the code is safer than the symbol because it is unambiguous. The dollar sign in particular is shared by dozens of currencies, so USD, CAD and AUD are worth spelling out when the audience is international.

The degree symbol ° is the one most often typed wrong. It is not the masculine ordinal º used in Spanish and Portuguese for 1º, and it is not a superscript zero or a ring above. For temperatures, Unicode provides the precomposed ℃ and ℉, but the recommended practice is actually to write the degree sign followed by a capital C or F, since the precomposed forms exist mainly for compatibility with older East Asian encodings. Note the spacing convention: scientific style is 25 °C with a space, while everyday English usually writes 25°C without one.

The multiplication and division signs deserve the same care as in mathematics. Screen dimensions written as 1920×1080 use the true multiplication sign, not a lowercase x, which is why copied specifications sometimes fail to match. The plus-minus sign ± is a single character, not a plus stacked on a hyphen.

The trademark, registered and copyright marks have legal conventions attached. ® may only be used with a registered mark and its misuse is a legal risk in several jurisdictions, while ™ can be used for an unregistered claim. Typographically all three are usually set as superscripts by the font rather than by manual formatting. On Windows, hold Alt with Num Lock on: £ is Alt+0163, € is Alt+0128, ¥ is Alt+0165, ° is Alt+0176, ± is Alt+0177, × is Alt+0215, ÷ is Alt+0247, © is Alt+0169, ® is Alt+0174 and ™ is Alt+0153. On macOS, Option+3 gives £, Shift+Option+2 gives €, Shift+Option+8 gives °, Option+G gives ©, Option+R gives ® and Option+2 gives ™. On Linux, AltGr+4 typically gives € and Compose then o then o gives °.