ASCII 238
Lowercase i with circumflexGreek small epsilon
ASCII 238 is î on Windows and ε in old DOS.
î (Small I with Circumflex) is byte 238 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00EE. French writes île and abîme with it, and Romanian uses it for a vowel between i and u, as in în (in). Romanian spelling changed in 1993. Before that, î was written inside words too, and the reform brought back â there, so older texts write cînd and pîine where current spelling has când and pâine. Search across Romanian archives needs to accept both forms. Old DOS had î at 140. The UTF-8 bytes C3 AE misread as î. The HTML entity is î.
ε (Small Epsilon) is byte 238 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+03B5. In programming it's machine epsilon, the gap between 1 and the next representable float: Python's sys.float_info.epsilon and JavaScript's Number.EPSILON are both 2.220446049250313e-16. That's why 0.1 + 0.2 === 0.3 is false and a tolerance fixes it, but the constant is only the right tolerance for numbers near 1. For bigger values compare relatively, as Python's math.isclose does. Don't confuse ε with ∈ (U+2208), the element-of sign in set notation. Code page 850 put ¯ on this byte. In UTF-8, ε is CE B5, and the HTML entity is ε.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
</>
#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 238 is î.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u00EE\n"); /* UTF-8: C3 AE */unsigned char b = 238; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 238 0xEE */return 0;}
Code Example
</>
#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 238 is ε only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0xEE is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(238);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xEE is -18.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)238;unsigned char u = 238;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -18 238 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u03B5\n"); /* CE B5 */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0238 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. Alt+140, without the zero, types it too. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00EE and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+I, then i.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type ee, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, caret, i.
- Phone
- Long-press i and pick î.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 238 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. US PCs insert ε, but PCs set to code page 850, common in Western Europe, insert ¯. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 03B5 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Control+Command+Space to open the Character Viewer, then search for "greek small letter epsilon".
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 3b5, then Space.
- Phone
- Add the Greek keyboard in your phone's keyboard settings and type ε there, or tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. The 1990 spelling rectifications made the circumflex on i optional, so ile and connaitre are accepted alongside the traditional forms. Verb endings keep it, as in the passé simple nous vîmes. Both spellings are correct, so choose one and use it consistently through a text.
It's a garbled î, not a trademark. Windows-1252 shows the second UTF-8 byte of î as the registered sign, so île turns into île. Don't delete the ® characters. Reopen the file as UTF-8 instead: in Notepad, the Open dialog has an Encoding list at the bottom, and choosing UTF-8 there reads it correctly.