How to Type © ™ and ® Symbols on Mac

The three legal marks every footer and product page needs are one Option-combo each on a Mac: Option+G for ©, Option+2 for ™, Option+R for ®. No special-characters menu, no copy-paste from another document. Here are the combos, the layout differences, and the text-replacement trick for people who type them daily.

The three shortcuts

• Option+G → © — copyright (U+00A9)
• Option+2 → ™ — trademark (U+2122)
• Option+R → ® — registered trademark (U+00AE)

All three are plain Unicode characters, so they render identically on Windows, Android, and the web — unlike some Mac keyboard exotica, these travel safely in emails, contracts, and app store listings.

These are the US-layout combos, and they work in any text field on macOS 13, 14, and 15. One layout note: on British keyboards, Option+2 types € instead — the trademark moves to Option+Shift+2. The © and ® combos stay put on both. If you're on another layout entirely, the Keyboard Viewer (below) shows exactly where your marks live.

Let autocorrect do it: (c) and text replacements

Many apps convert (c) to © automatically as you type — Pages, Word, and most rich-text editors do it out of the box. For a version that works system-wide and on your terms, build text replacements:

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard and click Text Replacements…
2. Click +.
3. Set Replace to a trigger like (c) — or a safer one like ;copy that you'd never type by accident — and With to ©.
4. Repeat for ™ and ®, then click Done.

Replacements expand in most native apps as you type and sync through iCloud to your iPhone and iPad, so the same trigger works everywhere you write. To retire one, select it in the same sheet and press − — that's the whole undo. The parenthetical triggers have one gotcha: legal text sometimes genuinely needs the literal string "(c)" (subsection c!), which is why the ;copy-style triggers age better.

Using the marks correctly (the one-minute version)

• © asserts copyright in creative work: © 2025 Your Name. In most countries the notice is optional — protection exists automatically — but the mark still signals ownership clearly.
• ™ claims a name or logo as a trademark, registered or not. Use it freely on your own branding.
• ® is legally meaningful: it declares a registered trademark, and using it on an unregistered mark is prohibited in many jurisdictions. When unsure, ™ is the safe mark.

Typographically, ™ and ® conventionally sit superscript after the name (most fonts build the smallness into the glyph), and © sits inline before the year. Once per product name or once per document is the modern convention — repeating ® on every mention reads as legal wallpaper.

On the web: use the entities

Writing HTML or a CMS that mangles special characters? The named entities are © for ©, ™ for ™, and ® for ® — they render identically and survive any encoding accident. In Markdown and modern editors, typing the real characters with the Option combos is fine; UTF-8 handles them everywhere. Either way, avoid images of the symbols — screen readers and search engines read characters, not pixels.

The neighbors: ℠, ℗, and friends

Unicode has a full legal shelf: ℠ the service mark, ℗ the sound-recording copyright, § the section sign (Option+6 on US layouts), and ¶ the pilcrow (Option+7). The rarer ones have no keystroke — press Ctrl+Cmd+Space for the Character Viewer, search by name, and double-click to insert. Anything you insert often gets remembered in the viewer's frequently-used row, which is nearly as fast as a shortcut.