How to Type a Degree Symbol

Quick Reference

Common Uses

• Temperature: 72°F, 22°C, -40°K
• Angles: 45° angle, 360° rotation
• Geographic coordinates: 40.7128° N, 74.0060° W
• Mathematics: trigonometric functions, rotations
• Brewing: Mash at 152°F for 60 minutes

Mobile Devices

Office, Word & Google Docs

Office suites have their own menus for inserting symbols — useful when the keyboard shortcut isn't firing (for example, on a laptop without a numeric keypad, or on a managed machine where the input language is restricted).

• Microsoft Word (Windows / Mac): Insert → Symbol → More Symbols, search "Degree Sign" or scroll the Latin-1 Supplement block. Word also auto-converts \degree followed by a space in equation mode.
• Google Docs: Insert → Special characters, type "degree" in the search box, or draw the symbol in the sketch panel. Substitutions → add your own shortcut (for example (deg) → °) to avoid the menu altogether.
• Excel / Google Sheets: =CHAR(176) returns °. Concatenate with a number — =A1&"°F" — to render temperatures in a cell.
• LaTeX: use \textdegree in text mode or ^{\circ} in math mode. The siunitx package provides \SI{72}{\degreeCelsius} for typeset unit values.

Formatting Conventions

Different style guides disagree on whether to put a space between the number and the degree symbol. The common conventions are:

• Temperatures: most US style guides write 72°F with no space, while the International System of Units (SI) recommends a space: 72 °C. Pick one and stay consistent within a document.
• Angles and coordinates: no space is standard — 45°, 40.7128° N.
• Ranges: the degree symbol usually attaches only to the upper bound in plain prose (20–25°C), though scientific writing often repeats it (20°C–25°C) to remove any ambiguity about the unit on the lower value.

When the degree symbol is used as part of a compound temperature unit (°C, °F, K), modern typographic practice treats the whole unit as inseparable and avoids breaking it across a line. In HTML, a non-breaking space between the number and the unit — 72 °C — keeps them together on reflow.

Common Mistakes

• Masculine ordinal (º) vs degree (°). These are different Unicode characters. º (U+00BA) is the Spanish/Portuguese masculine ordinal, common in abbreviations like 1.º. ° (U+00B0) is the degree sign. They look similar in some fonts but are not interchangeable — search engines and screen readers treat them differently.
• Ring above (˚) vs degree (°). U+02DA RING ABOVE is a combining accent (used for Å). It's visually identical but behaves as a diacritic; avoid it in temperatures.
• Using Alt+248 on Windows. That works in some code pages but produces the wrong character in others. Use Alt+0176 (with the leading zero) for consistent results across applications.
• Alt codes failing on laptops. Alt codes require a numeric keypad. On laptops without one, enable NumLock on the embedded keypad, or use Windows Character Map, or switch to the Unicode method.

Technical Details

Related Symbols