ASCII 243
Lowercase o with acute accentLess-than or equal to
ASCII 243 is ó on Windows and ≤ in old DOS.
ó (Small O with Acute) is byte 243 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00F3. Spanish writes canción and adiós with it, Portuguese avó, and Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Irish use it too. Spanish accents move with the word, which matters for search. The ó in canción, nación or camión disappears in the plural (canciones, naciones, camiones), because the stress no longer falls on the last syllable, and an accent can appear where the singular had none (joven, jóvenes). A search that matches exact strings treats those as unrelated, so use a Spanish-aware stemmer or fold accents before indexing. Old DOS had ó at 162. The UTF-8 bytes C3 B3 misread as ó. The HTML entity is ó.
≤ (Less Than or Equal) is byte 243 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+2264. In code it's written <=, but not every <= is a comparison. In Verilog, <= is also the non-blocking assignment, and in VHDL it assigns a signal, so a font that draws <= as a ≤ ligature makes an assignment look like a test. In hardware description code it's worth switching that ligature off. Code page 850 put ¾ on this byte. In UTF-8, ≤ is E2 89 A4, 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 243 is ó.Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */printf("\u00F3\n"); /* UTF-8: C3 B3 */unsigned char b = 243; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 243 0xF3 */return 0;}
Code Example
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#include <stdio.h>int main(void) {/* Byte 243 is ≤ only on a console using code page 437(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal thelone byte 0xF3 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */putchar(243);/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xF3 is -13.Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */char c = (char)243;unsigned char u = 243;printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -13 243 *//* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */printf("\u2264\n"); /* E2 89 A4 */return 0;}
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 0243 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. Alt+162, without the zero, types it too. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00F3 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+E, then o.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type f3, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, apostrophe, o.
- Phone
- Long-press o and pick ó.
How to Type It
- Windows
- Hold Alt and type 243 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. US PCs insert ≤, but PCs set to code page 850, common in Western Europe, insert ¾. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 2264 and press Alt+X.
- Mac
- Press Option+,.
- Linux
- In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 2264, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, less-than, equals.
- Phone
- Tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Solo, in almost every case. The RAE stopped requiring the accent on the adverb meaning only in 2010, and since 2023 it allows sólo where a sentence would otherwise be ambiguous: trabajo solo los domingos can mean I work alone on Sundays or I only work on Sundays, and sólo settles it as the second.
They sound the same today. Polish ó once marked a different vowel, which merged with u centuries ago, but the spelling kept the old distinction, so góra and kura share the same u sound. Related forms often switch ó to o, as in stół and stoły, which is the usual hint for which letter a word takes.
Only half of it. ó is the only accented Polish letter that Windows-1252 and code page 437 contain, so Polish text forced into either one comes out half-intact: Łódź becomes ?ód?. Polish needs Windows-1250, ISO-8859-2 or UTF-8.
The short code is read from the DOS table, and on a US system 243 there is the less-than-or-equal sign. Type Alt+0243 for ó and Alt+0211 for the capital Ó. Keep Alt+243 in mind for the times you really do want ≤.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Only < and & have to be escaped in text, so ≤ can go into a UTF-8 page as it is. ≤ is an optional readable alternative in HTML, but XML has only five predefined entities and ≤ isn't one of them, so in XML write the character itself or ≤.
The short code is read from the DOS table, and on a US system 243 there is the less-than-or-equal sign. Type Alt+0243 for ó and Alt+0211 for the capital Ó. Keep Alt+243 in mind for the times you really do want ≤.