U+00BD "½" Vulgar Fraction One Half Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
½
U+00BD "½" Vulgar Fraction One Half is a single typographic glyph representing the common fraction one half, allowing it to be displayed as a compact symbol rather than the separate characters "1", "/", and "2". It belongs to the C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement block, which includes punctuation, letters, and other symbols for Western European languages. This character is widely used in recipes, measurements, mathematical contexts, and informal texts to denote half of a unit or quantity. Its standardized encoding ensures consistent rendering across different software, operating systems, and platforms.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+00BD |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Vulgar Fraction One Half |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Fraction One Half |
| Block | Latin-1 Supplement |
| General Category | Other Number |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Other Neutral |
| Decomposition Type | Fraction |
| Decomposition Mapping | "1" U+0031 Digit One "⁄" U+2044 Fraction Slash "2" U+0032 Digit Two |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ½ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ½ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xC2 0xBD |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x00BD |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000000BD |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u00bd |