U+203E · Other punctuation
HTML entity
‾
Overline Symbol ‾
‾ is overline, U+203E. Unicode records it as a compatibility form of ̅ (compat form). It was added in Unicode 1.1, and Unicode files it under Other punctuation.
Also known as
- spacing overscore
Unicode 1.0 called this character spacing overscore. The standard renamed it later, but documents, fonts and font-editing tools from that era still use the old name.
Codes & technical data
| Unicode | U+203E | |
|---|---|---|
| HTML hex | ‾ | |
| HTML decimal | ‾ | |
| CSS | \203E | |
| JavaScript | \u{203E} | |
| Python | \U0000203E | |
| Java / C# | \u203E | |
| Rust | \u{203e} | |
| Swift | \u{203E} | |
| PHP | \u{203E} | |
| URL encoded | %E2%80%BE | |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 80 BE | |
| UTF-16 bytes | 203E | |
| Base64 | 4oC+ | |
| Decimal | 8254 | |
| HTML entity | ‾ | |
| Decomposes to | ̅ (compat form) | |
| Category | Other punctuation (Po) | |
| Introduced | Unicode 1.1 | |
Will ‾ survive being pasted?
- Normalisation. No. Anything that applies NFKC — search indexes, usernames, domain names, programming identifiers — rewrites ‾ as
̅. Safe for display, not for storage. - Legacy encodings. ‾ is Unicode-only — it has no Latin-1 equivalent, so a system stuck on an 8-bit encoding cannot represent it.
- Size. 3 bytes in UTF-8. Character-limited fields — SMS, bios, some form validators — usually count bytes, not characters.
Nearby in General Punctuation
The typographic marks that word processors quietly substitute for their ASCII lookalikes — real quotation marks, en and em dashes, the ellipsis. It also holds the invisible characters: zero-width spaces, joiners and directional marks that do work without drawing anything.
How to type ‾
| Windows | Type 203E then press Alt+X |
|---|---|
| macOS | Press Ctrl+Cmd+Space, then search for “overline” |
| Linux | Press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 203e, press Enter |
| HTML | ‾ |
About Unicode’s Other punctuation category
Unicode files this under "other punctuation", the category for marks that are not brackets, dashes or quotes.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I type the ‾ overline symbol?
- On Windows, type 203E and press Alt+X. On Linux press Ctrl+Shift+U then 203e. On any system the quickest route is the copy button on this page.
- What is the code for ‾?
- Overline is U+203E, written in HTML as ‾. In UTF-8 it takes 3 bytes. The table above lists every escape format.
- Will ‾ survive being pasted anywhere?
- Not always. Overline is a compatibility character: any system that applies Unicode NFKC normalisation — search indexes, usernames, identifiers — replaces it with ̅. Use it for display, not where text is normalised.