How to Type the Degree Symbol (°) on Any Device: Every Shortcut, Alt Code and Copy Method

CodexFuse Team · 2026-11-03T05:29:04.483Z · 12 min read min read

Learning how to type the degree symbol (°) is one of those small skills that pays off every single day: 21°C in the weather forecast, 350°F in a recipe, a 90° angle in a drawing, GPS coordinates, proofing spirits. The catch is that no keyboard prints ° on a labeled key, and every device hides it in a different place — so most people end up googling it again every time. This guide collects every working method in one place: the Windows Alt code, the Mac shortcut, iPhone and Android long-presses, Word, Google Docs and Excel, copy-paste fallbacks, and the code escapes for HTML and JavaScript. If you reach for other special characters just as often, the site's symbol tools keep arrows, fractions, and math marks a click away.

How do you type the degree symbol?

The fastest way depends on your device. On a Mac with a US keyboard layout, press Shift+Option+8. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0176 on the numeric keypad. On iPhone or Android, long-press the 0 key and slide to °. If nothing works, copy ° from this page — it pastes into any app on any operating system.

1. Mac: Shift+Option+8 types ° system-wide on US layouts (TextExpander, 2026).
2. Windows with a number pad: hold Alt, type 0176 on the numeric keypad, release Alt (Microsoft's support documentation lists ° as ALT+0176).
3. Windows without a number pad: press Win+. (period) and pick ° from the Symbols tab (Microsoft's Windows keyboard tips page).
4. iPhone or Android: switch to the numbers keyboard, touch and hold the 0 key, and slide to ° (TextExpander; xerobit.dev).

Every degree-symbol shortcut at a glance

Use this table as your cheat sheet. The sources column names the reference each shortcut was verified against on November 3, 2026.

How do you type the degree symbol on Windows?

The fastest Windows method is the Alt code: hold down the Alt key, type 0176 on the numeric keypad, and release Alt — ° appears. Num Lock must be on, and the digits have to come from the keypad itself; the number row across the top of the keyboard does not work for Alt codes (Technize, 2026; Microsoft's support table lists ° as ALT+0176).

If your keyboard has no number pad, press Win+. (period) or Win+; (semicolon) to open the emoji-and-symbols panel, switch to the Symbols tab, and click ° — this works on both Windows 11 and Windows 10, per Microsoft's own Windows keyboard tips page. A second built-in option is Character Map: search the Start menu for "Character Map", open Advanced view, search "degree sign", then Select and Copy (Technize, 2026). On laptops with an embedded keypad, pressing Fn+NumLk (or Fn+F11) can turn the U, I, O, J, K, L, M keys into a numeric keypad for Alt+0176 (Live2Tech, 2026).

Two details worth knowing. Alt+248 produces the identical ° in many apps — 248 is where the symbol sat in the old DOS character set, while 0176 is its position in the Windows character set — but it is font- and app-dependent, so treat it as a fallback rather than the primary shortcut (Technize, 2026). On a touch screen, open the touch keyboard, tap &123, and long-press the 0 key (Live2Tech, 2026).

What is the degree symbol shortcut on a Mac?

On a US keyboard layout, press Shift+Option+8 and ° appears in any app. It is worth knowing that Apple does not publish this combination in its Mac User Guide — the shortcut is documented by the Mac press and is visible in Apple's own Keyboard Viewer — so if it ever stops working, the official route is the Character Viewer (TextExpander, 2026; Technize, 2026).

To open the Character Viewer, press Control+Command+Space, choose Edit > Emoji & Symbols, click the Input menu in the menu bar, or press the Globe/Fn+E key, then search "degree" — per Apple's Mac User Guide (article mchlp1560, fetched 2026-11-03). Typing with it is as simple as double-clicking the symbol.

Watch out for three near-miss combos that look right but type the wrong character: Option+8 gives you a bullet (•), Option+0 gives you the masculine ordinal indicator (º) — a different character entirely, covered below — and Option+K gives you the ring above (˚) used in Scandinavian letters (Technize, 2026; MacMost, 2026). Keyboard layout matters too: on a French AZERTY layout the degree sign sits on its own top-right key (Shift+°), on German layouts it is the Shift position of the key left of Backspace, and Italian layouts keep the US-style Option+Shift+8 — so treat Shift+Option+8 as the US-layout answer and the Character Viewer as the universal one (Tuttosemplice, 2026).

How do you type the degree symbol on iPhone and Android?

On both phones the answer is the same: touch and hold the 0 key. On iPhone or iPad, switch to the numbers keyboard, long-press 0, and slide your finger to ° (TextExpander, 2026; CoolLetteringGenerator, 2026). This is Apple's documented mechanism for special characters: "touch and hold the letter, number, or symbol related to the character" you want (Apple iPhone User Guide, "Type with the onscreen keyboard", fetched 2026-11-03). Nothing in Apple's current keyboard documentation suggests a degree-specific change in recent iOS versions.

On Android with Gboard, long-press 0 and select °, or open the ?123 symbols page (xerobit.dev, 2026). If long-pressing does not produce symbols, check Gboard's Settings > Preferences > "Touch and hold keys for symbols" — the default hold duration is 300 milliseconds and is adjustable (Android Police, 2026). On Samsung's keyboard, the same symbols appear under Keyboard Settings > Layout > Alternative characters (WSXDN, 2026, third-party source).

What is the degree symbol Alt code?

The Windows Alt code for the degree symbol is 0176: hold Alt, type 0176 on the numeric keypad, release Alt. Microsoft's own support documentation lists ° as ALT+0176 in its symbol table — note that the page's prose example happens to show the lookalike º (masculine ordinal indicator) beside the word "degree", which appears to be a typo; the table entry and the result on screen are the correct °.

Alt+248 is the legacy alias: it types ° in many programs because 248 was the symbol's position in the old DOS character set. Keep this reference straight, because one wrong digit changes the character:

One Linux and Chromebook method for completeness: press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 00b0, and press Enter — the Unicode input sequence for U+00B0 (Technize, 2026).

How do you type ° in Word, Google Docs, and Excel?

In Microsoft Word, type 00B0 and press Alt+X — Word converts the Unicode hex code into °. Microsoft documents this exact sequence, with the caveat that Alt+X conversion is not available in every Office program: PowerPoint, for example, cannot convert Unicode codes this way (Microsoft Office support, fetched 2026-11-03). The menu route also works: Insert > Symbol > More Symbols, set the Subset to "Latin-1 Supplement", and double-click ° (Live2Tech, 2026).

Word's AutoCorrect has entries like (c) to © and (tm) to ™, but Microsoft documents no default (o)-to-° replacement — so do not expect one. You can add your own: in AutoCorrect Options, set Replace to something like "deg" and With to ° (Microsoft Word AutoCorrect documentation, fetched 2026-11-03).

In Google Docs, choose Insert > Symbols > Special characters, search "degree", and click the symbol — you can also type the Unicode value directly in that dialog (Google Docs support, 2026). Google Sheets cannot insert special characters this way, so copy ° from a Docs document, or use the formula =UNICHAR(176), which returns the Unicode character for a number (Google Docs support, 2026). In Excel on Windows, =CHAR(176) produces ° through the Windows-1252 character set; =UNICHAR(176) is the cross-platform equivalent and works in both Excel and Sheets (Excel formula references, 2026; Microsoft's CHAR documentation confirms the 1–255 number-to-character mechanism).

How do you type the degree symbol in HTML and JavaScript?

In HTML, write ° (or ° or °) — all three produce °, which is Unicode character U+00B0. The WHATWG HTML Standard defines the named reference deg; as mapping to U+00B0, and named character references are case-sensitive, so ° will not work (WHATWG HTML Standard, §13.5; ComputerHope; MDN Glossary, all fetched 2026-11-03). In JavaScript strings, the escape is \u00B0 — exactly four hexadecimal digits after \u — and it yields the same U+00B0 character (MDN JavaScript text-formatting documentation).

Is the degree sign the same as the masculine ordinal indicator?

No. The degree sign (°) is U+00B0, and the masculine ordinal indicator (º) is U+00BA — they are two different Unicode characters, and mixing them up is the most common degree-symbol mistake. The Unicode Consortium's own mailing-list archive states that U+00BA is a "superscript o" and is not identical to U+00B0 (unicode.org, 2006). This distinction is the article's signature fact, so here it is plainly:

Visually, the degree sign is a uniform circle; the masculine ordinal is a superscript lowercase "o" shape — taller, sometimes underlined, with varying stroke width depending on the font (Unicode character references, fetched 2026-11-03). Use ° for degrees, always. One more typography note for good measure: style guides write 21°C and 98.6°F with two characters (degree sign + letter), not the precomposed ℃ (U+2103) or ℉ (U+2109) single characters — in SI typography the space between the number and °C is a non-breaking space (unicodecharacter.com; Toolbox Kit).

Where can you copy and paste the degree symbol?

Right here: ° — select it, copy it, and paste it into any app on any device. Copy-paste is the only method that cannot fail, which is why dedicated copy-paste pages for the degree symbol exist (CoolLetteringGenerator, SymbolsHelp, and xerobit.dev all rank for it). For everything else symbol-shaped, the site's symbols cluster has you covered: the hearts to copy and paste collection holds 120 ready-to-use hearts, and star symbols covers stars, sparkles, and asterisks — same copy-and-go idea, different characters.

Sources

Every shortcut and fact in this guide was verified on November 3, 2026 from a live page: Microsoft's support documentation (the ° ALT+0176 symbol table, the Windows keyboard tips page, the 00B0 + Alt+X Office article, the AutoCorrect options page, and the CHAR function reference), Apple's Mac User Guide Character Viewer article and iPhone "Type with the onscreen keyboard" guide, TextExpander's degree-symbol guide, Technize's laptop shortcuts guide, Live2Tech's Windows walkthrough, the Unicode Consortium mailing-list archive on U+00BA, unicodecharacter.com and unicodesymbol.com code-point references, the WHATWG HTML Standard named-characters table, MDN's character-reference and JavaScript text-formatting documentation, Google Docs support articles on special characters and UNICHAR, Android Police's Gboard settings piece, Tuttosemplice's keyboard-layout guide, MacMost's special-characters roundup, CoolLetteringGenerator, SymbolsHelp, and xerobit.dev. Conflicting or third-party claims are attributed as such in the text.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Alt code for the degree symbol?

The degree symbol Alt code is 0176: hold Alt, type 0176 on the numeric keypad, and release Alt. Microsoft's own support table lists ° as ALT+0176. Alt+248 is a legacy alias that works in many apps, while Alt+0186 types the lookalike masculine ordinal indicator (º) instead — a different character.

How do I type the degree symbol on a laptop without a number pad?

Press Win+. (period) and pick ° from the Symbols tab, use Character Map (search it in the Start menu, Advanced view, search "degree sign"), or long-press the 0 key on the touch keyboard after tapping &123. Some laptops also have an embedded keypad on the U/I/O/J/K/L/M keys via Fn+NumLk for Alt+0176.

Why does my keyboard type º instead of °?

You are typing the masculine ordinal indicator (U+00BA), not the degree sign (U+00B0). On a Mac, Option+0 produces º — you want Shift+Option+8. On Windows, Alt+0186 produces º — you want Alt+0176. They look similar, but only U+00B0 is correct for temperatures and angles.

Can I type the degree symbol in Google Sheets?

Google Sheets cannot insert special characters directly, so copy ° from a Google Docs document or from this page — or use the formula =UNICHAR(176), which returns the degree symbol in both Sheets and Excel.

What is the HTML code for the degree symbol?

Write ° (or ° or °) in HTML — all three produce °, Unicode U+00B0. The WHATWG HTML Standard defines deg; as mapping to U+00B0, and named references are case-sensitive. In JavaScript, the escape is \u00B0 with exactly four hex digits.