Talk:Numero sign

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&numero;

Indefatigable has deleted mention of &numero;. However, such browsers as Lynx and Links display it correctly. So it must not be so bogus. — Monedula 14:35, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's pretty poor reasoning. What determines whether &numero; is a valid HTML entity is the official W3C HTML standard, not some random browser's implementation thereof. Lots of browsers support their own nonstandard entities, but that doesn't automatically make them valid HTML. —Psychonaut 16:06, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that the authors of Lynx have invented &numero; out of nothing. Maybe it sits in some other standard that you have missed. — Monedula 13:51, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Maybe, but if so, then the onus is on you to provide the citation. Psychonaut 14:10, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Just to demonstrate o mhow the symbol appears using the code, here it is: &numero . It is not displayed in Fx2, which implements the W3C standard very closely, so I would assume it is non-standard HTML.

ftp://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MISC/SGML.TXT — Monedula 15:14, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Nothing in that file indicates that &numero; is an HTML element. All it states is that &numero; is an SGML entity for the ISO Cyrillic-2 set. But it's not even a primary source; as it states in the header, it's just some random programmer's compilation from various sources. Anyway, feel free to add this information to the article if you think it's of importance. (I don't, considering that pure SGML is rarely used nowadays, and almost no one reading English Wikipedia will care about Cyrillic SGML entities.) Psychonaut 15:35, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Masucline ordinal indicator

The article stated that the "o" in the numero sign is the masculine ordinal indicator. Until someone can provide a citation for that assertion, I changed the statement to say that it resembles the masculine ordinal indicator. I am more inclined to believe that the "o" represents the "o" in numero; it wouldn't make sense for it to be an ordinal indicator in the way that those indicators are normally used (unless one were trying to say "to the Nth degree", but I've never seen the numero sign used for that). — mjb 06:41, 20 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The masculine ordinal indicator in itself is, essentially, just superscript "o". — Monedula 16:40, 20 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In appearance, yes, but if one calls the "o" in the numero sign "masculine ordinal indicator" then it implies that the "o" has a certain meaning — modifying a preceding masculine number to make an ordinal out of it. In the way it is used in the numero sign, it does not have those semantics; it is just a superscript "o", AFAIK. — mjb 18:39, 20 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Languages

The article states that numero is used in "many languages" but doesn't care to elaborate, other than to give an example of Russian keyboards containing it. What languages use the numero? —Scott5114 ↗ 22:55, 24 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It may be important to note that in the Russian language (and probably in other languages using Cyrillic script), the numero sign, if technically impossible to enter, is usually substituted just with the Latin letter "N". The trigraph "No." is virtually never used in such case. 89.179.247.65 (talk) 20:45, 2 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

British usage

I'm from the UK, and would always write simply No. - even in handwriting. I would never, ever write it as №. The simpler usage is in no way confined to "typewriters and computers that do not support this symbol", at least in Britain. Actually, the № symbol always looks "Continental" to me. 86.132.140.178 (talk) 00:19, 22 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm from the UK, and I would write it № or Nº or N^o. Well, those doesn't really represent it properly. I'd make the "o" a little bit smaller and higher than usual, and put a dot under it and a bit to the right. It would be something between the extremes of "No." and "№". — Chameleon 01:36, 21 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Numero sign v. masculine ordinal indicator

The current revision says: "The numero sign is also used as indication of an ordinal number". But this is merely a superior o, not a numero sign. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.232.9.216 (talk) 16:44, 2 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Mac keyboard

On my US Mac keyboard, option-shift-semicolon produces an acute-accented capital U. Is this character really produced by that combination of keys in some default US configuration? —David Eppstein (talk) 21:58, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's the US Extended keyboard layout, not the US keyboard layout. -- Evertype·✆ 10:17, 13 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Upper case?

The AskOxford reference cited uses the lower case n, which suggests we should be following general rules of capitalization here. Why does Wikipedia insist we should use the upper case N? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.106.225.195 (talk) 14:32, 20 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The problem, as I see it, is that we've failed to very clearly distinguish between

the "numero sign" character as designated by Unicode (and the older standards Unicode is based on), and
the concept of an abbreviated numero, without specific styling, which the Unicode character ostensibly represents.

Unicode only acknowledges the uppercase N. The character's decomposition is explicitly uppercase 'N' + lowercase 'o'. But as the quoted text in the article points out, the standard seems to only have this composite character at all just because it's trying to remain compatible with certain Cyrillic and East Asian standards (the character is or was on a lot of Russian keyboards, for example). The way I read it, even though there is a general concept of numero in English and other languages, and this word can be abbreviated in various ways following standard capitalization rules, in Unicode there is no general numero sign character for this purpose; there is only this one that, at least historically, represents the as-used-in-Cyrillic form of numero: uppercase 'N', which if rendered in a serif font is usually more stylized than normal, plus a raised, sometimes underlined small "o". —mjb (talk) 06:16, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]