Degree sign (°)
The degree sign (°) is a small raised circle. It marks degrees of temperature (20 °C) and degrees of angle, latitude and longitude (a 90° angle).
How to read it
Unicode names it DEGREE SIGN (U+00B0). The American Heritage Dictionary lists the units it stands for: a unit of a temperature scale, a unit of angle equal to 1/360 of a complete turn, and a unit of latitude or longitude, 1/360 of a great circle. NIST’s Guide for the Use of the SI (SP 811) spaces the two kinds differently. A Celsius temperature has a space between the number and °C (30.2 °C, not 30.2°C or 30.2° C). An angle has no space: the degree, minute and second signs follow the number directly, as in 30°22′8″. NIST prefers decimal degrees (22.20° rather than 22°12′), except in fields such as cartography and astronomy.
Also searched as: °, degree sign meaning, degree sign symbol, degrees symbol, degree symbol.
Look-alikes
Unicode cross-refers ° to several small raised circles that are different characters: the ring above ˚ (U+02DA), an accent; the superscript zero ⁰ (U+2070); and the masculine ordinal indicator º (U+00BA), which Unicode marks as Spanish. There are also single characters for ℃ DEGREE CELSIUS (U+2103) and ℉ DEGREE FAHRENHEIT (U+2109), which Unicode treats as compatibility forms of ° followed by C or F.
More punctuation and typographic symbols
Browse symbols drawn with circles.
Sources
- C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement (code chart, Range 0080–00FF), The Unicode Standard, Version 18.0, Unicode Consortium, Latin-1 Supplement, 00B0 and 00BA
- Letterlike Symbols: Range 2100–214F (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Version 18.0, Unicode Consortium, Letterlike Symbols, 2103 and 2109
- degree (American Heritage Dictionary entry), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition, HarperCollins Publishers, degree, n. 6–8
- Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI), NIST Special Publication 811 (2008), National Institute of Standards and Technology, 7.2 and 7.3
Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research