How to Type the Degree Symbol on Mac (°)

It's 72°F outside and your Mac can say so properly: Option+Shift+8 types the degree symbol in any app. That's the whole trick — but there's a nearly identical impostor character one keystroke away that fools people constantly, so it's worth thirty seconds to learn which circle is which.

The shortcut

Press Option+Shift+8 — hold Option and Shift, tap 8. You get °, the true degree sign, U+00B0. It works in every text field on the Mac: documents, browsers, filenames, chat. Think of it as "Shift+8 is the asterisk; add Option and the star becomes a degree."

Temperature and angles read naturally: 72°F, 22°C, a 45° cut, 360° video. Typography convention puts no space between the number, the symbol, and the temperature scale letter. The combo types the genuine U+00B0 degree sign every time, in every app — documents, spreadsheets, browser fields, chat — and being a plain character, it survives copy-paste, exports, and platform hops without complaint.

The impostors: º and ˚

Two lookalikes cause most degree-sign confusion:

• Option+0 types º — the masculine ordinal indicator, U+00BA. It's a tiny underlined-in-some-fonts "o" used in Spanish and Portuguese (1º = primeiro). It sits lower and often renders with a baseline stroke.
• Option+K types ˚ — the ring above diacritic, U+02DA, a floating accent mark meant to combine visually with letters (as in Å).

All three look like small circles; only ° is the degree sign. Why care? Search and matching: a document that says 25ºC won't be found by someone searching 25°C, spell checkers and data pipelines treat them as different characters (because they are), and mixed usage looks subtly wrong in print. If you've been using Option+0 for years — you're in large company — a find-and-replace fixes history: copy the impostor from your document into the Find field, put the real ° in Replace, and let the app sweep the file clean.

Other routes to the same circle

• Character Viewer — press Ctrl+Cmd+Space, search "degree", and double-click. This also surfaces the single-character ℃ (U+2103) and ℉ (U+2109), which exist mostly for East Asian typography; in English text, ° plus a letter is the standard form.
• Text replacement — if you type temperatures all day, set a snippet: System Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements…, click +, and map something like ;deg to °. It expands automatically as you type, syncs to your iPhone and iPad through iCloud, and asks nothing of your memory.
• Dictation — saying "seventy two degrees" while dictating produces "72 degrees" spelled out; dictation doesn't insert the symbol, so the keyboard shortcut remains the reliable route.

Converting while you're at it

If you're typing a temperature because you're converting one, skip the math: press Cmd+Space and type 72 f in c — Spotlight converts units inline and shows the answer before you finish typing. Copy it with Cmd+C, add your properly typed ° symbol, and move on. The same works for angles' cousins in other unit families — lengths, weights, data sizes — making Spotlight the natural companion to the degree key.

On other layouts

The Option+Shift+8 combo belongs to the US layout. Many European layouts place ° right on the keyboard — on German keyboards it's Shift+the key left of 1 — and others move the Option combo elsewhere. If the US shortcut gives you something unexpected, open the Keyboard Viewer (input menu → Show Keyboard Viewer), hold Option and Shift, and read where your layout hides the degree sign. Whatever layout you use, the Character Viewer route works identically everywhere.