The two superscript digits that predate the rest of the superscript set: for exponents, unit abbreviations, and "x squared" notation. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
² and ³ (superscript two and three, U+00B2 and U+00B3) are the exponent characters behind x², E=mc², and unit abbreviations like m² and cm³. Unlike the rest of the superscript digits, they've been part of the standard Latin-1 character set since the 1980s, which is why they render correctly in far more places than ⁰, ¹, or ⁴–⁹.
The two legacy superscript digits, ready to paste after a number or unit.
The remaining superscript numerals, added to Unicode much later, in a different block than ² and ³.
The most-copied real-world uses of ² and ³: area and volume units.
² and ³ are an accident of encoding history as much as a mathematical notation. When ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) was standardized in 1987 as the dominant 8-bit character set for Western European computing, it included exactly two superscript digits, ² and ³, because they were already common in French and Scandinavian typewriter fonts for scientific and technical writing, particularly unit abbreviations like m² and cm³. No other superscript digit made the cut.
That left a gap: ⁰, ¹, and ⁴ through ⁹ didn't get standard codepoints until Unicode introduced the dedicated Superscripts and Subscripts block (U+2070–U+209F) years later, largely to support algebraic and chemical notation in full. Because ² and ³ arrived first and rode into every system that adopted Latin-1, including Windows-1252, they're the two superscript digits you can count on rendering correctly almost anywhere, while the rest of the set is a more recent, occasionally-unsupported addition.
| Platform / Tool | Squared (²) | Cubed (³) |
|---|---|---|
| Windows (Alt code) | Alt+0178 | Alt+0179 |
| Word / Windows (Unicode input) | 00B2 then Alt+X | 00B3 then Alt+X |
| Mac | Character Viewer (Cmd+Ctrl+Space), search "superscript" | |
| HTML | ² | ³ |
CSS content | content: "\00B2" | content: "\00B3" |
| LaTeX (math mode) | ^2 | ^3 |
² and ³ have been part of the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+00B2/U+00B3) since ISO 8859-1 in the late 1980s, so they're baked into fonts and legacy 8-bit encodings almost universally. ⁰, ¹, and ⁴–⁹ weren't added until Unicode created a dedicated Superscripts and Subscripts block much later, so older fonts and systems are more likely to be missing them.
Windows: Alt+0178 for ² and Alt+0179 for ³ on the numeric keypad. Mac: use the Character Viewer, or the HTML entities ² / ³ in web contexts. Otherwise, copy them from this page.
They represent the same exponent, but ^2 is plain-text shorthand programmers and calculators use when superscript formatting isn't available; ² is the actual superscript character. Use ² in prose and unit labels (m²), and ^2 in code or plain-text math where superscript rendering isn't guaranteed.
Yes, ² and ³ are plain Latin-1 Supplement characters and display normally in usernames and display names on Instagram, Discord, TikTok, and WhatsApp.
A Discord nickname stops at 32 characters, an Instagram bio at 150, a TikTok bio at 80, and X weights some characters as two. The UltraTextGen counter reads all of them at once, and counts a multi-codepoint Unicode emoji the way each platform actually bills it.
Open the character counter →