♯ Sharp Sign: Meaning, Unicode, and How to Type It

The ♯ (Sharp Sign) is a standard musical symbol used to indicate that a note should be played one half-step higher in pitch. While it closely resembles the everyday hashtag or pound sign (#), the sharp sign is unique. It features slanted horizontal strokes and perfectly straight vertical lines. This subtle design difference makes it a distinct character primarily reserved for sheet music, chord charts, and music theory.

The symbol traces its origins back to medieval music notation. It evolved from the "b quadratum" (square B), a symbol initially used to denote a naturally raised B note. Over centuries of hand-drawn manuscripts, the ink strokes shifted, resulting in the recognizable grid-like shape we use today to raise the pitch of any note on the musical staff.

In the Unicode standard, the Sharp Sign sits at code point U+266F and belongs to the Miscellaneous Symbols block.

While musicians rely on ♯ for writing chord progressions like F♯ minor or C♯maj7, the symbol also makes cameo appearances in other fields. In programming, the popular Microsoft language C# (C-Sharp) takes its name directly from this musical concept, implying a step up from C/C++. However, because the actual sharp sign is difficult to type on standard keyboards, programmers universally use the standard hashtag (#) in practice. On social media, audiophiles and music creators often use the true sharp sign in their bios or posts to add a touch of typographic polish to their music discussions.

Typing the ♯ symbol requires a bit of maneuvering depending on your device. On Mac, you can open the Character Viewer by pressing Command + Control + Space and searching for "sharp". Windows users can use the Character Map or hold the Alt key and type 266F on the numeric keypad (if enabled in the registry), though copying and pasting from the web is often the fastest method. On iOS and Android, the symbol is absent from default keyboards, so setting up a custom text replacement shortcut is the easiest way to keep it handy.

The most common mix-up happens between the Sharp Sign (♯) and the Number Sign (#). Remember: the sharp sign has slanted horizontal lines to prevent them from blending into the horizontal lines of a musical staff. Other closely related Unicode characters include its musical siblings, the Flat Sign (♭, U+266D) which lowers a pitch, and the Natural Sign (♮, U+266E) which cancels out a sharp or flat.