Unicode character Feminine Ordinal Indicator
About this character
The character ª is known as Unicode character Feminine Ordinal Indicator and carries the Unicode code point U+00AA, which is 170 in decimal. It belongs to the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080–U+00FF), which gathers the accented letters of Western European languages along with the punctuation and symbols inherited from ISO 8859-1.
In memory, ª takes 2 bytes in UTF-8 (0xC2 0xAA) and 1 in UTF-16 (0x00AA). That difference is why badly configured forms or databases garble this character: they assume one byte per character.
How to type ª
| System | What to do |
|---|---|
| Windows | On Windows, hold Alt and type 170 on the numeric keypad. In Word or WordPad, type 00AA and press Alt + X to turn the code into the character. |
| macOS | On a Mac, open the Character Viewer with Ctrl + ⌘ + Space and search for “Unicode character Feminine Ordinal Indicator”. |
| Linux | On Linux (GTK), type Ctrl + ⇧ + U, 00AA then press Enter. |
| HTML / Web | In an HTML page, write ª. Use \00AA in CSS, \u00AA in JavaScript and \u00AA in Python. |
| On this site | The simplest route is the Copy button above: the character goes straight to your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere. |
Keyboards that include ª
This character is not on any common physical layout, so the Copy button above is the quickest way to get it into a document.
Codes and encodings
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Code point | U+00AA |
| Unicode block | Latin-1 Supplement (U+0080–U+00FF) |
| Decimal | 170 |
| Hexadecimal | 0x00AA |
| Octal | 0252 |
| Binary | 10101010 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 0xC2 0xAA |
| UTF-16 units | 0x00AA |
| Named HTML entity | ª |
| Decimal HTML entity | ª |
| Hex HTML entity | ª |
| CSS escape | \00AA |
| JavaScript escape | \u00AA |
| Python escape | \u00AA |
| URL encoding | %C2%AA |
Frequently asked questions
What is the Unicode code for ª?
Its code point is U+00AA, which is 170 in decimal and 0252 in octal. In HTML you can write it as ª or ª.
Why does ª show up as a box or a question mark?
An empty box means the font has no glyph for U+00AA. The character is still in the text: switching to a font that covers the block (Noto, DejaVu or Segoe UI Symbol) makes it appear.
Can I use ª in a filename, a URL or a password?
In a URL it must be encoded as %C2%AA. Modern filesystems accept it, though it is still risky when moving files between systems. For passwords, some forms reject non-ASCII characters outright.