U+212A "K" Kelvin Sign Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
K
U+212A "K" Kelvin Sign is a typographic symbol representing the kelvin, the SI base unit of thermodynamic temperature. It is encoded as a distinct character for compatibility with earlier text encodings and to ensure a visually consistent appearance, particularly in mathematics and scientific notation, where it avoids confusion with the uppercase letter 'K' used for other purposes such as the prefix kilo. While its use is largely deprecated in favor of the ordinary letter K in modern Unicode text normalization processes, the Kelvin sign remains supported for backward compatibility in legacy documents and specialized technical contexts where its specific glyphic form is required.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+212A |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Kelvin Sign |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Degrees Kelvin |
| Block | Letterlike Symbols |
| General Category | Uppercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "K" U+004B Latin Capital Letter K |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | K |
| HTML Hex Encoding | K |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE2 0x84 0xAA |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x212A |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x0000212A |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u212a |
Unicode Properties
| Full Composition Exclusion | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| Uppercase | Yes |
| Simple Lowercase Code Point | "k" U+006B Latin Small Letter K |
| Lowercase Code Point | "k" U+006B Latin Small Letter K |
| Simple Case Folding | "k" U+006B Latin Small Letter K |
| Case Folding | "k" U+006B Latin Small Letter K |
| Cased | Yes |
| Changes When Casefolded | Yes |
| Changes When Casemapped | Yes |
| Changes When Lowercased | Yes |
| Changes When NFKC Casefolded | Yes |
| NFKC Casefold | "k" U+006B Latin Small Letter K |
| NFKC Simple Casefold | "k" U+006B Latin Small Letter K |
| Script | Latin |
| Script Extensions | Latin |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| ID Start | Yes |
| XID Start | Yes |
| ID Continue | Yes |
| XID Continue | Yes |
| Alphabetic | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Rotated |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Alphabetic letter |
| Sentence Break | Upper |