Fraction Symbols ½
Ready-made fraction characters.
Tip · press and hold to pick several at once
How to use fraction symbols
These are single characters, not two digits with a slash between them. ½ is one Unicode character the same way A is — which is why it survives being copied, emailed, pasted into a spreadsheet and opened on another machine. Typing 1/2 by hand gives you three characters that any autocorrect is free to reflow, and Word in particular will sometimes convert them and sometimes not, depending on which fraction it happens to know.
They go anywhere text goes: recipes and ingredient lists, clothing and tyre sizes, drawings and cut lists, chat messages, spreadsheet cells. One thing worth knowing before you build on them — in Excel and Google Sheets a pasted ½ is text, not the number 0.5. It will not add up, and a column of them sorts alphabetically. If the value has to be calculated, type 0.5 and format the cell to display a fraction instead.
Unicode has ready-made characters only for the fractions people write often — halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths, ninths and tenths, plus ⅟ for one-over-something and ↉ for zero thirds. Anything outside that list has no character of its own. For those, build the fraction from the superscript and subscript digits on the math symbols page with the fraction slash ⁄ between them — that slash is a different character from the ordinary / and tells the font to set the digits as a fraction where it can.
Questions
Why does ½ not work in an Excel formula?
Because it is text, not a number. A pasted fraction character looks like a value but behaves like a letter — it will not sum, average or sort numerically. To calculate with it, type 0.5 into the cell and apply a fraction number format; the cell will show ½ and still do arithmetic.
How do I write a fraction that is not on this list?
Combine superscript and subscript digits with the fraction slash ⁄ (U+2044), which is not the same character as an ordinary slash. So ⁵⁄₁₆ rather than 5/16. Fonts that support it will tighten the digits into a proper fraction; ones that do not will still show the parts in the right order.
Do these work in Word and Google Docs?
Yes, and better than typing 1/2 does. Word autocorrects a few common fractions into characters and leaves the rest as digits and a slash, which is why a document can end up with both styles in one line. Pasting the character gives you the same shape everywhere.
Why does a fraction show up as an empty box?
The font on that device has no glyph for it. The common ones — ½ ¼ ¾ — are in almost every font; the sevenths and ninths are not. Anything your own device cannot draw is hidden from this page automatically, so what you see here is safe to copy.
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