℃ is a single Unicode character that packs the degree sign and a capital C into one glyph, handy to paste, though most typographers still reach for plain °C. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
The degree Celsius sign (℃, Unicode U+2103) is a precomposed character in the Letterlike Symbols block that combines the degree sign (°) and a capital C into a single glyph. It exists mainly so that older East Asian text, where a full temperature reading often occupied one character cell, could round-trip through Unicode without changing length. For new text, Unicode and most style guides actually recommend writing the degree sign followed by a plain C (°C) rather than the one-character ℃, but the single glyph remains the fastest thing to copy when you just need the mark.
The single-character ℃ and the two-character °C sequence Unicode prefers. Copy whichever your context needs.
Each of these gets swapped in for ℃, and each is a separate character with its own meaning.
The Celsius scale is named after Anders Celsius (1701–1744), the Swedish astronomer who proposed a 100-degree temperature scale in 1742. His original version was inverted, 0° marked the boiling point of water and 100° the freezing point, and it was flipped to its modern orientation (0° freezing, 100° boiling) shortly after his death. The scale was long called centigrade (Latin for a hundred steps) before Celsius became its official name in 1948.
Unicode encodes ℃ at U+2103 in the Letterlike Symbols block but flags it as a compatibility character: its formal decomposition is the two characters ° (U+00B0) and C (U+0043). It was included so that text from legacy Japanese, Korean, and Chinese encodings, which frequently stored a temperature reading in a single fixed-width cell, could convert to Unicode and back without changing length. Because of that, the Unicode standard and the W3C recommend composing temperatures as °C in ordinary text and keeping the single ℃ for compatibility or fixed-cell layouts.
| Platform / Tool | Method |
|---|---|
| Windows (Word / Unicode input) | Type 2103, then press Alt+X |
| Mac | Character Viewer (Cmd+Ctrl+Space), search "degree celsius" |
| HTML | ℃ or ℃ |
CSS content | content: "\2103" |
| Recommended form | Degree sign ° (Alt+0176 / Option+Shift+8) followed by C |
Visually yes, and Unicode treats them as compatibility-equivalent, but ℃ is a single character (U+2103) while °C is two characters (U+00B0 followed by U+0043). Search, spell-check, and line breaking can treat them differently, which is why most style guides recommend the two-character °C.
For normal writing, use °C: the degree sign followed by a capital C. The single ℃ exists mainly for round-tripping legacy East Asian text and fixed-width layouts; it is fine to paste but is not the typographic default.
In Word or any app that supports it, type 2103 and press Alt+X, or paste ℃ from this page. There is no dedicated Celsius key on a standard keyboard.
℃ is degrees Celsius and ℉ is degrees Fahrenheit. K is the kelvin, the SI base unit of temperature, written as a plain capital K with no degree sign, and the Unicode Kelvin sign (U+212A) even normalizes to an ordinary K.
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