Do I have to put ™ after every mention of the brand?

No. The usual practice is to mark the first or most prominent use on a page, like the logo or the first mention in the text, and leave later mentions plain. Repeating it every time adds clutter without making the claim any stronger. For questions about protecting your own mark, a trademark lawyer is the person to ask.

What's the difference between ™ and ℠?

™ claims a mark used on goods, and ℠ (U+2120) claims one used for services, like a restaurant chain or a bank. Neither requires registration. ℠ isn't in Windows-1252 or code page 437, and some fonts leave it out, so check that it actually renders before putting it in a logo line or footer.

Why does Alt+153 give Ö instead of ™?

Alt+153 without a zero reads the DOS table, where 153 is Ö. Alt+0153 reads Windows-1252 and gives ™. The two tables only agree on the ASCII range below 128, so every code above that gives a different character depending on whether the zero is there.

Old Austrian records say ™sterreich instead of Österreich

That ™ is a capital Ö. DOS code pages keep Ö at byte 153, and Windows-1252 puts the trademark sign there, so Österreich and Öl come out with a ™ in front. Lowercase ö breaks at the same time, into ”, which confirms the diagnosis. ICU's converter fixes the file: `uconv -f ibm-850 -t utf-8 old.txt > new.txt`.

ASCII 153

Trademark signUppercase O with umlaut

ASCII 153 is ™ on Windows and Ö in old DOS.

™ (Trademark Sign) is byte 153 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+2122. It marks a name or logo claimed as a trademark, and nobody has to register anything to use it. That's the difference from ®: in the US, ® is only for marks registered with the USPTO, while ™ just states the claim. The glyph is already small and raised, so wrapping it in a sup element in HTML shrinks it twice and lifts it above the line. Search and slugs can surprise you too. NFKC normalization turns ™ into the letters TM, so an index that normalizes stores Acme™ as AcmeTM, and a slug generator may produce acmetm. If you're digging through broken text, remember that ™ is also the last character of â€™, the mangled apostrophe, so not every ™ on a damaged page is a trademark. Its own UTF-8 bytes are E2 84 A2, which misread as â„¢. The HTML entity is ™, and the registered sign ® is byte 174.

Ö (Capital O with Umlaut) is byte 153 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+00D6. Windows-1252 has the trademark sign ™ at 153, so German DOS text read as Windows-1252 turns Österreich into ™sterreich. Code page 850 kept Ö at 153 too. Small ö is 148 in DOS.

SymbolLatin Letter

Technical Details

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 153 is ™.
       Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */
    printf("\u2122\n");   /* UTF-8: E2 84 A2 */

    unsigned char b = 153;         /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */
    printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b);    /* 153 0x99 */
    return 0;
}

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* Byte 153 is Ö only on a console using code page 437
       (chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal the
       lone byte 0x99 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */
    putchar(153);

    /* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0x99 is -103.
       Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */
    char c = (char)153;
    unsigned char u = 153;
    printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u);   /* -103 153 */

    /* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */
    printf("\u00D6\n");          /* C3 96 */
    return 0;
}

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 0153 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 2122 and press Alt+X.
Mac: Press Option+2.
Linux: In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 2122, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, t, m.
Phone: iPhone: tap the character at the top of this page to copy it. Android (Gboard): tap ?123, then =\< and tap ™.

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 153 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. Windows reads it as a DOS code and inserts Ö.

Ö is also ASCII 214 on Windows, which has the full guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. The usual practice is to mark the first or most prominent use on a page, like the logo or the first mention in the text, and leave later mentions plain. Repeating it every time adds clutter without making the claim any stronger. For questions about protecting your own mark, a trademark lawyer is the person to ask.
™ claims a mark used on goods, and ℠ (U+2120) claims one used for services, like a restaurant chain or a bank. Neither requires registration. ℠ isn't in Windows-1252 or code page 437, and some fonts leave it out, so check that it actually renders before putting it in a logo line or footer.
Alt+153 without a zero reads the DOS table, where 153 is Ö. Alt+0153 reads Windows-1252 and gives ™. The two tables only agree on the ASCII range below 128, so every code above that gives a different character depending on whether the zero is there.
That ™ is a capital Ö. DOS code pages keep Ö at byte 153, and Windows-1252 puts the trademark sign there, so Österreich and Öl come out with a ™ in front. Lowercase ö breaks at the same time, into ”, which confirms the diagnosis. ICU's converter fixes the file: `uconv -f ibm-850 -t utf-8 old.txt > new.txt`.

Frequently Asked Questions

Alt+153 without a zero reads the DOS table, where 153 is Ö. Alt+0153 reads Windows-1252 and gives ™. The two tables only agree on the ASCII range below 128, so every code above that gives a different character depending on whether the zero is there.
That ™ is a capital Ö. DOS code pages keep Ö at byte 153, and Windows-1252 puts the trademark sign there, so Österreich and Öl come out with a ™ in front. Lowercase ö breaks at the same time, into ”, which confirms the diagnosis. ICU's converter fixes the file: `uconv -f ibm-850 -t utf-8 old.txt > new.txt`.

ASCII 153

Trademark signUppercase O with umlaut

ASCII 153 is ™ on Windows and Ö in old DOS.

Symbol

Latin Letter

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 153 is ™.

Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */

printf("\u2122\n"); /* UTF-8: E2 84 A2 */

unsigned char b = 153; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */

printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 153 0x99 */

return 0;

}

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* Byte 153 is Ö only on a console using code page 437

(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal the

lone byte 0x99 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */

putchar(153);

/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0x99 is -103.

Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */

char c = (char)153;

unsigned char u = 153;

printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -103 153 */

/* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */

printf("\u00D6\n"); /* C3 96 */

return 0;

}