About Superscript Two Superscript Digit Two
Superscript Two Superscript Digit Two is the Unicode character ² at codepoint U+00B2 in the Latin-1 Supplement block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The raised two of squared units and exponents, and the character Unicode files as a number rather than as punctuation: general category No, numeric value 2, bidirectional class EN. A bidirectional algorithm therefore treats it as a digit, not as a symbol. It carries the compatibility decomposition <super> 0032, so NFKC and NFKD replace it with an ordinary 2 and the exponent is silently lost. It reached Unicode through ISO 8859-1 rather than through the Superscripts and Subscripts block, which is why it sits beside superscript one in the Latin-1 range while superscript nine lives elsewhere with different width and line-break properties.
Typical uses
- Squared units in plain text: cm², m², km²
- Exponents where no styling is available — filenames, spreadsheet cells, chat
- Footnote markers in older European typesetting
At a glance
- U+00B2, Latin-1 Supplement; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category No, numeric value 2
- Bidirectional class EN; East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class AI
- Windows-1252 byte 0xB2; HTML ² and the legacy ²
- NFKC and NFKD replace it with U+0032
Historical Notes
Origins
Its history is an encoding history rather than a typographic one: it exists as a separate character because eight-bit European codepages needed squared units and footnote markers, and Unicode inherited those codepages wholesale.
Unicode
Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in the Latin-1 Supplement. The consequence of that inheritance is the split: one, two and three are in Latin-1 and the rest of the superscript digits are in Superscripts and Subscripts, a different block entirely.
The split is visible in the property data
The two neighbourhoods do not just sit apart, they behave differently. This character is East Asian Width Ambiguous with line break class AI; superscript nine, in the other block, is Neutral with line break class AL. So mixing them can change how a line breaks and how wide the text measures in a CJK context, quite apart from any difference in how the glyphs are drawn.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Superscript Two Superscript Digit Two
To use the Superscript Two Superscript Digit Two symbol (²) in HTML, insert the
entity ² directly into your markup. The decimal entity ² works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\B2';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u00B2' evaluates to ². In Python source, write '\u00B2'.
The character encodes to C2 B2 as UTF-8 bytes and 00B2 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 178.
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 2. Never store it in a field that will later be normalised and parsed as a number.
- General category No with numeric value 2, so Unicode-aware numeric functions will read it as the digit two.
- Bidirectional class EN. In right-to-left text it is laid out as part of a number, not as a neutral symbol.
- Windows-1252 byte 0xB2, so it survives legacy pipelines where the other superscript digits do not.
- For real typesetting, raise an ordinary digit with the font's superscript feature. This character is for places with no styling at all.
In the Wild
On 5 August 2026 the German Wikipedia article about the square metre carried this character seventeen times, writing m² as a character throughout. English Wikipedia's article on the same unit carried three, and the article about the Superscripts and Subscripts block one more, as a chart specimen.
The absences are the more interesting half, because they are not failures to load. Wikipedia's articles on the metre, on ions and on the speed of light, the BIPM's own page on measurement units and NIST's units page all carried the full text of their subject and no occurrence of this character. Their exponents are set with markup, and markup does not survive as a character. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Why does my exponent disappear?
Something normalised the text. NFKC and NFKD replace this character with an ordinary 2 by design, because that is what its compatibility decomposition says.
Is it the same as pressing superscript in a word processor?
No. This is a pre-drawn character; the word processor raises the font's own digit. The second is better wherever styling survives.
Why are ¹ ² ³ in a different block from ⁴ to ⁹?
Because the first three came in from Latin-1 and the rest were added later. The split shows up in their width and line-break properties, not only in the font.
Will a search for "m2" find "m²"?
Only if the search normalises. Some do, some do not, and that inconsistency is the practical cost of using the character.