U+2174 · Letter number
Small Roman Numeral Five Symbol ⅴ
ⅴ is small roman numeral five, U+2174. Unicode records it as a compatibility form of v (compat form). It was added in Unicode 1.1, and Unicode files it under Letter number.
Codes & technical data
| Unicode | U+2174 | |
|---|---|---|
| HTML hex | ⅴ | |
| HTML decimal | ⅴ | |
| CSS | \2174 | |
| JavaScript | \u{2174} | |
| Python | \U00002174 | |
| Java / C# | \u2174 | |
| Rust | \u{2174} | |
| Swift | \u{2174} | |
| PHP | \u{2174} | |
| URL encoded | %E2%85%B4 | |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 85 B4 | |
| UTF-16 bytes | 2174 | |
| Base64 | 4oW0 | |
| Decimal | 8564 | |
| Decomposes to | v (compat form) | |
| Numeric value | 5 | |
| Category | Letter number (Nl) | |
| Introduced | Unicode 1.1 | |
Will ⅴ survive being pasted?
- Normalisation. No. Anything that applies NFKC — search indexes, usernames, domain names, programming identifiers — rewrites ⅴ as
v. Safe for display, not for storage. - Legacy encodings. ⅴ 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.
Other five characters
Unicode names 9 characters ending in “five”. They differ by direction, weight or decoration rather than by meaning.
Nearby in Number Forms
Roman numerals as single characters, and the vulgar fractions beyond the three Latin-1 supplies. A Roman numeral here is one character, not a run of letters, so Ⅷ and VIII sort and search differently.
How to type ⅴ
| Windows | Type 2174 then press Alt+X |
|---|---|
| macOS | Press Ctrl+Cmd+Space, then search for “small roman numeral five” |
| Linux | Press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 2174, press Enter |
| HTML | ⅴ |
About Unicode’s Letter number category
This is a letter number: a character that looks like a letter but carries a numeric value, the way Roman numerals do.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I type the ⅴ small roman numeral five symbol?
- On Windows, type 2174 and press Alt+X. On Linux press Ctrl+Shift+U then 2174. On any system the quickest route is the copy button on this page.
- What is the code for ⅴ?
- Small Roman Numeral Five is U+2174. In UTF-8 it takes 3 bytes. The table above lists every escape format.
- Will ⅴ survive being pasted anywhere?
- Not always. Small Roman Numeral Five is a compatibility character: any system that applies Unicode NFKC normalisation — search indexes, usernames, identifiers — replaces it with v. Use it for display, not where text is normalised.