⅓ One Third Symbol
The one-third symbol (⅓) is a single ready-made character for 1/3 — and unlike ¼, ½ and ¾ it has no short Alt code and no Word autocorrect.
Also known as: 1/3 symbol, one third symbol, one thirds, vulgar fraction one third.
Codes
| Symbol | ⅓ | |
| Two thirds | ⅔ · U+2154 | |
| Unicode | U+2153 | |
| HTML entity (named) | ⅓ | |
| HTML entity (decimal) | ⅓ | |
| HTML entity (hex) | ⅓ | |
| CSS | \2153 | |
| LaTeX | \frac{1}{3} | |
| Windows Alt code | Alt + 8531 |
How to type ⅓ (One Third Symbol)
Alt + 8531 works in apps that accept decimal-Unicode Alt input (Word among them). There is no short Alt + 0nnn code — ¼ ½ ¾ are in the legacy Latin-1 set and ⅓ is not. Elsewhere press Win + . (period) and search “one third”, or copy ⅓ above.
No default keystroke. Open Character Viewer (Control + Cmd + Space) and search “one third”, or copy ⅓ above.
Type 2153, then press Alt + X. Typing 1/3 and a space does not autocorrect — Word's fraction AutoFormat only knows ¼, ½ and ¾.
Insert → Special characters, then search “one third” or “vulgar fraction”.
In math mode use \frac{1}{3}; \tfrac{1}{3} keeps it inline-sized, and \nicefrac{1}{3} (units package) gives the slanted ⅓ form in text.
Usage
- ⅓ is the ready-made character for a third: ⅓ cup of flour, ⅓ of respondents, a ⅓ share.
- Why ⅓ is harder to type than ½: ¼ ½ ¾ live in Latin-1, the old Western European set, so they inherited short Alt codes and Word's autocorrect. ⅓ lives in Unicode's Number Forms block (U+2150–U+218F) along with ⅔ ⅕ ⅛ and the rest, which got neither.
- Because ⅓ is one character, you cannot do arithmetic on its parts and some sort routines will not read it as 0.333…. It is typography, not a value — for real math write \frac{1}{3}.
- ⅓ is exact where 0.33 is not: one third is a repeating decimal, so any truncation introduces error. In code, prefer a rational or a division over a decimal literal.