Is it più or piú in Italian?

Più, with a grave accent. Italian only distinguishes open and closed sounds on e and o, so a final stressed i or u takes the grave, as in più and così. Piú with an acute shows up in some publishers' house styles and in text typed on non-Italian keyboards, but the grave is the standard form.

What's the difference between ou and où in French?

Ou without the accent means or, and où means where: tu viens ou pas? against où vas-tu? A quick test is to swap in ou bien. If the sentence still works, write ou. That little word is also the reason the AZERTY keyboard has an ù key.

Why does Alt+249 give ∙ instead of ù?

Type Alt+0249 for ù, and Alt+0217 for the capital Ù. The short code without a zero is looked up in the DOS table instead, and on a US system 249 there is a small centered dot, which is what you got.

ASCII 249

Lowercase u with grave accentBullet operator

ASCII 249 is ù on Windows and ∙ in old DOS.

ù (Small U with Grave) is byte 249 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00F9. Italian ends virtù and gioventù with it, and French needs it for a single word, où (where), yet the traditional French AZERTY keyboard gives it a key of its own. Vietnamese uses ù for the falling tone. In French the accent carries meaning, since ou without it means or, so keep it in any text you display, even if you fold it away for search. Old DOS had ù at 151. The UTF-8 bytes C3 B9 misread as Ã¹. The HTML entity is ù.

∙ (Bullet Operator) is byte 249 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+2219. It's a centered dot, with the middle dot · right after it at 250. Unicode has several dots that look almost the same: · (U+00B7), the middle dot, • (U+2022), the bullet, and ⋅ (U+22C5), the dot operator, which is the one Unicode intends for a dot product like a ⋅ b. Search treats all four as unrelated, so normalize them if users might type any of them. There's no named HTML entity, so use ∙. Code page 850 put ¨ on this byte. In UTF-8 it's E2 88 99.

Latin LetterMath Symbol

Technical Details

Code Example

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#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 249 is ù.
       Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */
    printf("\u00F9\n");   /* UTF-8: C3 B9 */

    unsigned char b = 249;         /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */
    printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b);    /* 249 0xF9 */
    return 0;
}

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* Byte 249 is ∙ only on a console using code page 437
       (chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal the
       lone byte 0xF9 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */
    putchar(249);

    /* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xF9 is -7.
       Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */
    char c = (char)249;
    unsigned char u = 249;
    printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u);   /* -7 249 */

    /* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */
    printf("\u2219\n");          /* E2 88 99 */
    return 0;
}

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 0249 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. Alt+151, without the zero, types it too. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00F9 and press Alt+X.
Mac: Press Option+`, then u.
Linux: In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type f9, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, backtick, u.
Phone: Long-press u and pick ù.

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 249 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 2219 and press Alt+X.
Mac: Press Control+Command+Space to open the Character Viewer, then search for "bullet operator". Option+Shift+9 (·) and Option+8 (•) give similar-looking but different characters.
Linux: In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 2219, then Space.
Phone: The • on phone keyboards is a bullet, a different character. Tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Più, with a grave accent. Italian only distinguishes open and closed sounds on e and o, so a final stressed i or u takes the grave, as in più and così. Piú with an acute shows up in some publishers' house styles and in text typed on non-Italian keyboards, but the grave is the standard form.
Ou without the accent means or, and où means where: tu viens ou pas? against où vas-tu? A quick test is to swap in ou bien. If the sentence still works, write ou. That little word is also the reason the AZERTY keyboard has an ù key.
Type Alt+0249 for ù, and Alt+0217 for the capital Ù. The short code without a zero is looked up in the DOS table instead, and on a US system 249 there is a small centered dot, which is what you got.

Frequently Asked Questions

Type Alt+0249 for ù, and Alt+0217 for the capital Ù. The short code without a zero is looked up in the DOS table instead, and on a US system 249 there is a small centered dot, which is what you got.

ASCII 249

Lowercase u with grave accentBullet operator

ASCII 249 is ù on Windows and ∙ in old DOS.

Latin Letter

Math Symbol

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 249 is ù.

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

printf("\u00F9\n"); /* UTF-8: C3 B9 */

unsigned char b = 249; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */

printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 249 0xF9 */

return 0;

}

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* Byte 249 is ∙ only on a console using code page 437

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

lone byte 0xF9 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */

putchar(249);

/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xF9 is -7.

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

char c = (char)249;

unsigned char u = 249;

printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -7 249 */

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

printf("\u2219\n"); /* E2 88 99 */

return 0;

}