About Superscript One Superscript Digit One
Superscript One Superscript Digit One is the Unicode character ¹ at codepoint U+00B9 in the Latin-1 Supplement block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The raised one, filed by Unicode as a number rather than as punctuation: general category No, numeric value 1, bidirectional class EN. Like its two neighbours in the Latin-1 range it carries a compatibility decomposition — <super> 0031 — so NFKC and NFKD replace it with an ordinary 1. The code chart's cross-references point at superscript two, superscript three and superscript zero, which is Unicode acknowledging in its own annotations that the superscript digits are split across two blocks. It is Windows-1252 byte 0xB9, which is why it survives in old files at all.
Typical uses
- Footnote markers in plain text, where no styling is available
- Exponents and unit powers written inline: m¹, x¹
- Ordinal and note references in older European typesetting
At a glance
- U+00B9, Latin-1 Supplement; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category No, numeric value 1
- Bidirectional class EN; East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class AI
- Windows-1252 byte 0xB9; HTML ¹ and the legacy ¹
- NFKC and NFKD replace it with U+0031
Historical Notes
Origins
Its existence is an accident of codepage design rather than of typography. ISO 8859-1 needed raised one, two and three for footnote markers and unit exponents, and Unicode inherited that set unchanged.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in the Latin-1 Supplement. The standard's own cross-references from this character point at superscript two, superscript three and superscript zero — three characters, two of which are in this block and one of which is not, which is as clear a statement of the split as the chart can make.
What the split actually costs
Beyond the font-matching problem, the two blocks carry different properties. This character is East Asian Width Ambiguous with line break class AI; the superscript digits in the other block are Neutral with class AL. An expression mixing them is not only drawn from two design sets, it measures and breaks differently.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Superscript One Superscript Digit One
To use the Superscript One Superscript Digit One symbol (¹) in HTML, insert the
entity ¹ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ¹ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\B9';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u00B9' evaluates to ¹. In Python source, write '\u00B9'.
The character encodes to C2 B9 as UTF-8 bytes and 00B9 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 185.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.
Things to know
- NFKC and NFKD turn it into a plain 1. Anything normalising before storage will lose the raised form.
- General category No with numeric value 1, so Unicode numeric functions read it as the digit one.
- Bidirectional class EN, so right-to-left layout treats it as part of a number.
- Windows-1252 byte 0xB9 — it survives legacy pipelines that the digits in the other block do not.
- Where you control the styling, raise an ordinary digit instead. This character is for plain-text contexts only.
In the Wild
On 5 August 2026 English Wikipedia's article about the Superscripts and Subscripts block carried this character once, as a chart specimen. It appears once more on the article about the interrobang, where it is part of a footnote reference rather than an exponent.
The pages where a raised one would belong carried none — not the encyclopaedia articles on the metre or the speed of light, not the BIPM's measurement-units page, not NIST's units page. Those pages loaded with full text; their raised digits, where they have any, are set with markup rather than with characters.
That scarcity is not a verdict on the character's usefulness. It is a measure of how rarely plain text is the only option. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Why is ¹ in a different block from ⁴?
Because ¹, ² and ³ were inherited from ISO 8859-1 and the rest of the superscript digits were added later, in Superscripts and Subscripts.
Will normalisation change it?
NFKC and NFKD will, into an ordinary 1. NFC and NFD leave it alone.
Is it a digit?
To Unicode, yes: general category No, numeric value 1. To most software that parses numbers, no.
Should I use it for footnotes?
Only in plain text. Anywhere with styling, raise a normal digit — the heights and weights will match.