The degree symbol is one character, °. Unicode calls it U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN and files it as a symbol, and the same character does duty for temperature, for angles and for map coordinates. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0176 on the numeric keypad. On a Mac, press Option and Shift and 8. On a phone, press and hold the zero key.
Two things about this character catch people out, and both are measured below. The Alt code that most pages print beside 0176 is 248, which comes from a different numbering table, so adding the leading zero that every other Alt-code guide tells you to add gives you ø instead. And at least eight characters look like a degree sign, one of which is a letter rather than a symbol, and it quietly turns into a plain o the moment your text is searched or normalised.
How Do You Type the Degree Symbol on Windows?
Hold Alt, type 0176 on the numeric keypad, and release Alt. The character appears when you let go. Most pages on this subject print a second code beside that one, 248, and it also works. They are both correct and they are not the same instruction, which is the subject of its own section further down.
With a numeric keypad
Num Lock has to be on, and the digits have to come from the numeric keypad rather than the number row above the letters, which is the single most common reason the method appears not to work. Hold Alt down for the whole sequence and release it only at the end; the release is what commits the character. Both Alt 0176 and Alt 248 produce the degree sign, but they are not interchangeable digit for digit. Adding a zero to one of them or dropping it from the other gives you a different character entirely, which is measured further down this page.
Without a numeric keypad
Most laptops have no numeric keypad, which makes the Alt code useless on the machine most readers are holding. Press Windows and the period key together to open the emoji panel, choose the omega tab for symbols, and pick the degree sign from the list. The panel can be driven with Tab and the arrow keys if you would rather not reach for the mouse. The older route is Character Map, which Microsoft’s own support page recommends, and which is worth knowing for one reason: it prints the keystroke for whatever character you select in its status bar, so it tells you the code as well as giving you the character. In a browser field, the HTML entity below always works.
How Do You Type the Degree Symbol on a Mac?
Press Option and Shift and 8 together. That is the whole method, and unlike Windows there is no numeric code involved at all, so none of the Alt numbers on this page mean anything on a Mac.
Using the Character Viewer
If you would rather find the character than remember the chord, press Control and Command and Space to open the Character Viewer, then search it for the word degree. The viewer also shows related characters beside the one you select, which is a useful way to see the lookalikes discussed later on this page sitting next to each other at the same size. For anything you type often, the more durable answer is a text replacement rule under System Settings, Keyboard, Text Replacements.
How Do You Type the Degree Symbol on a Phone?
Press and hold the zero key on the number layout, then slide onto the degree sign in the pop-up that appears. This is the same gesture on both major platforms, and it is faster than any of the desktop methods.
On iPhone and iPad
Tap the 123 key to switch to the number layout, press and hold the 0 key, and a small pop-up appears with the degree sign in it. Slide your finger onto it and release. There is no need to switch to the symbols layout first. If you write temperatures often, the better long-term answer is a text replacement: Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement, where you can bind a short string of your own to the character and stop hunting for it.
On Android
The same long press on the 0 key works on Gboard and on most stock keyboards. Where a keyboard app has not bound that gesture, switch to the symbols layout instead, usually reached by the ?123 key and then a second symbols page. This is given as the common case rather than as a universal instruction, because Android keyboards are replaceable in a way iOS keyboards are not, and a third-party keyboard can and does change the key bindings.
How Do You Type the Degree Symbol in Word, Excel and Google Docs?
All three offer a symbol or special-character dialog, and Word additionally accepts a Unicode code entered directly in the document. The dialogs are the reliable route if you use the character rarely, and a substitution rule is the right answer if you use it often.
In Word and Excel
In Word, either use Insert, Symbol, or type 00B0 in the document and immediately press Alt and X, which converts the code you just typed into the character. Note that this number is hexadecimal and belongs to neither of the two Alt-code tables described later. Excel has the same Insert, Symbol dialog and also the CHAR(176) function. There is one point Excel users need that the general guides omit: a degree sign typed into a cell makes that cell text, so if you are going to do arithmetic on the number, apply the degree through a custom number format instead and leave the underlying value numeric.
In Google Docs
Use Insert, then Special characters, and either search the panel for the word degree or draw the shape in the sketch box, which is the fastest route when you do not know what a character is called. Docs has no keyboard shortcut for it out of the box. If you need the character regularly, add a rule under Tools, Preferences, Substitutions, which is the same mechanism Microsoft Word calls autoformat under a different name, and which turns a string you choose into the symbol as you type.
How Do You Type the Degree Symbol on Linux and Chrome OS?
Press Ctrl and Shift and U together, release them, type 00B0, then press Enter or the space bar. This answers the question Google itself lists in its People Also Ask box for this query, which asks for exactly this code. The number here is hexadecimal Unicode, the same form Word expects with Alt and X, which makes these two instructions the same instruction in different wrappers. On Linux desktops with a Compose key enabled there is a second route, Compose followed by o and o.
How Do You Write It in HTML and CSS?
In HTML the named entity is ° and the numeric entity is °. In CSS content, the escape is \00B0. In a plain web form with none of those available, the character itself is ° and copying it from this sentence works. That is the only copy-and-paste this page offers, deliberately: two domains exist that do nothing but serve this one character, they both rank on this query, and there is no value in this site becoming a third.
Why Does Alt+0248 Give the Wrong Character?
Because the leading zero decides which table Windows reads the number from, and 248 and 0176 are numbers from two different tables that happen to point at the same character.
We checked this with Python’s standard library codecs rather than repeating it. Reading byte 0xF8 as code page 437, the old DOS table, returns the degree sign, and 0xF8 is 248 in decimal. Reading byte 0xB0 as Windows-1252 also returns the degree sign, and 0xB0 is 176 in decimal. Swap the leading zeros over and both numbers point somewhere else entirely.
| Keystroke | Table it reads | Character you get |
|---|---|---|
| Alt + 248 | code page 437, byte 0xF8 | ° degree sign |
| Alt + 0176 | Windows-1252, byte 0xB0 | ° degree sign |
| Alt + 0248 | Windows-1252, byte 0xF8 | ø o with stroke |
| Alt + 176 | code page 437, byte 0xB0 | ░ light shade block |
Wikipedia already publishes where the 248 comes from, and credit for that belongs to it: its article on this character explains that code page 437 held the degree sign at 0xF8. What is added here is the failure case rather than the history. Indeed’s guide, which ranks on this query, tells the reader to hold Alt and type “0176” or “248”, and both of those are right. Nothing on the page says that the two numbers are drawn from different tables, so a reader who has learned the general rule that Alt codes take a leading zero, including from our own page on typing an em dash where that rule holds, will apply it to 248 and get ø. On this character the rule inverts.
Which Characters Look Like a Degree Sign, and What Breaks?
Several do, and the useful question is not which ones look alike but what each one becomes once your text is searched, sorted or normalised. That is where the damage happens, and it is silent.
Wikipedia carries the complete lookalike list for this character and it is longer than the one below, running to Duployan shorthand and Canadian syllabics; if you want the full inventory, that is where it lives. What follows is the behaviour, measured here with Python 3.12.13 and unicodedata at Unicode version 15.0.0, which no page on this search reports.
| Character | Unicode category | After normalisation |
|---|---|---|
U+00B0 degree sign |
So, a symbol | unchanged |
U+00BA masculine ordinal |
Lo, a letter | becomes o |
U+00AA feminine ordinal |
Lo, a letter | becomes a |
U+02DA ring above |
Sk, a modifier symbol | becomes a space plus a combining mark |
U+2218 ring operator |
Sm, a maths symbol | unchanged |
U+212A Kelvin sign |
Lu, a capital letter | becomes an ordinary K |
The one to watch is the masculine ordinal, because it is the one people actually end up with. It sits on Spanish, Portuguese and Italian keyboard layouts as an ordinary key, and it is a hair smaller and often underlined depending on the font. Unicode classifies it as a letter, not a symbol, so 25º is a number followed by a letter. Normalise that string and it becomes 25o. A search for 25° will not find it, a find and replace will not catch it, and nothing anywhere reports an error. This is the same failure as the invisible characters that survive a copy and paste: the text looks right and stops matching.
How Do You Write Degree C?
Write it as two characters: the degree sign followed by a capital C. Unicode does define a single character for it, U+2103 DEGREE CELSIUS, and several of the pages ranking for this question offer that character as the answer. It is not wrong, but it is less portable than it looks. We normalised it and it decomposes into exactly those two characters, degree sign then C, and the same is true of U+2109 DEGREE FAHRENHEIT. Characters of that kind exist in Unicode largely so that older encodings can be converted without loss, rather than as the recommended way to write a unit today. The two-character form is what survives processing unchanged, so it is the safer thing to type.
What This Page Does Not Claim
No keystroke described here was tested by us. There is no Windows machine in this environment, so the Alt-code results are encoding arithmetic performed with the Python standard library, which is what determines the character each table returns, and they are presented as arithmetic rather than as a keyboard test. Two of the things on this page were published by someone else first and are credited in the text where they are used: the lookalike inventory and the code page 437 history are both Wikipedia’s, and its list is more complete than ours. Questions of style, meaning when a degree symbol is the right mark and how to space it, are not answered here.
How This Guide Was Built
Eight ranking results were captured live on 3 September 2026 with the country set to the United States and personalisation off, and the AI Overview was captured twice to confirm what it said was stable. Seven of the eight were extracted in full at no cost. One Reddit thread returned 131 characters behind a bot challenge and is counted as blocked rather than as a source, and one result is a video whose transcript was read but which is not treated as an article for the purposes of measuring how deep the ranking pages go.
Keyword research was run the same day against Google autocomplete, 108 probes returning 264 unique queries. That source publishes no search volume and none is quoted here. Character facts were measured with Python 3.12.13 and unicodedata at Unicode version 15.0.0, and the code page arithmetic with the standard library cp437 and cp1252 codecs. The Python version is named because the default interpreter on macOS is 3.9.6 at Unicode 13.0.0, and two versions can disagree about characters added between them.
Sources credited by name above: Wikipedia, Microsoft, Indeed and TextExpander.
