ASCII 242
Lowercase o with grave accentGreater-than or equal to
ASCII 242 is ò on Windows and ≥ in old DOS.
ò (Small O with Grave) is byte 242 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00F2. Italian ends words like però and ciò with it, it's in names such as Nicolò, and Catalan and Scottish Gaelic use it as well (això, òran). When a form or a keyboard won't take the accent, Italians fall back on an apostrophe, so Nicolò arrives as Nicolo'. That apostrophe is exactly what breaks SQL built by string concatenation, the same way O'Brien does. Use parameterized queries and store the name as typed. Old DOS had ò at 149. The UTF-8 bytes C3 B2 misread as ò. The HTML entity is ò.
≥ (Greater Than or Equal) is byte 242 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+2265. In code it's written >=, and a ≥ pasted into source is just an unknown character. The confusion runs the other way too: fonts with programming ligatures, such as Fira Code, draw >= as a single ≥-like glyph, but the file still contains two ASCII characters, so searching the code for ≥ finds nothing. Russian maths typesetting uses a slanted form, ⩾ (U+2A7E), which is a separate character. Code page 850 put ‗ on this byte. In UTF-8, ≥ is E2 89 A5, and the HTML entity is ≥.
Technical Details
Technical Details
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 242 is ò.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u00F2\n"); /* UTF-8: C3 B2 */unsigned char b = 242; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 242 0xF2 */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 242 is ≥ only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0xF2 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(242);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xF2 is -14.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)242;unsigned char u = 242;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -14 242 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u2265\n"); /* E2 89 A5 */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0242 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. Alt+149, without the zero, types it too. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00F2 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+`, then o.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type f2, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, backtick, o.
- Phone
- Long-press o and pick ò.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 242 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. US PCs insert ≥, but PCs set to code page 850, common in Western Europe, insert ‗. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 2265 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+..
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 2265, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, greater-than, equals.
- Phone
- Tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Italian writes the accent on every word stressed on its last vowel, and here it also changes the word: però means however, while pero is a pear tree. The same rule gives città and virtù. Leaving it off is common in quick typing, but it counts as a spelling mistake.
They mark two different o sounds. Grave ò is the open o, as in això, and acute ó the closed one, as in només. Accents also separate word pairs, such as dona (woman) and dóna (gives). So a Catalan text needs both, and neither can stand in for the other.
Po', with an apostrophe. It's short for poco, so the apostrophe marks the missing letters, and pò is a misspelling.
Frequently Asked Questions
A UTF-8 file was opened as Windows-1252, which splits ≥ into its three bytes and shows them as â, ‰ and ¥. In Word, if the File Conversion dialog appears when you open the text file, choose Other encoding and then Unicode (UTF-8). ≤ breaks the same way and turns into ≤.
Julia. It treats ≥, ≤ and ≠ as built-in aliases for >=, <= and !=, so x ≥ 0 is valid code there, and its REPL and editor plugins expand \ge plus Tab into ≥. Python, JavaScript and SQL don't, and neither do Excel formulas, which only accept >=.