Partial Derivative Symbol

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Unicode Character
Unicode Hex
U+2202
HTML Entity
Decimal Code
8706

About the Partial Derivative Symbol

Last reviewed on May 7, 2026

The Partial Derivative symbol (∂) is one of the mathematical symbols characters in the AllSymbols catalog. It comes from one of the Unicode Mathematical Operators blocks (U+2200–U+22FF or U+2A00–U+2AFF), which collect the operators, relations, and quantifiers used in mathematics. These characters are designed to align visually with each other and with the rest of math text.

Where this character is used

For inline math expressions in body text, captions, and chat, Unicode operators read more cleanly than ASCII substitutes. Use the proper minus sign (−) instead of the hyphen-minus, the multiplication sign (×) instead of the letter x, and the not-equal sign (≠) instead of the != digraph. For typeset math (proofs, papers), prefer a real math typesetting system — Unicode is for plain text.

Code references

In Unicode, Partial Derivative sits at code point U+2202. Web pages reference it with the HTML numeric entity ∂; CSS rules reference it as a quoted hex escape (the four-digit code prefixed with a backslash); in JavaScript and most modern source-code contexts you can either paste the literal character or use a Unicode escape with the same hex digits.

Rendering and font support

Some math operators have ASCII look-alikes that mean different things: the bullet (•) is not the multiplication dot, the asterisk is not the multiplication sign, and the slash is not the division sign. When precision matters, copy the dedicated character.

Related characters

If Partial Derivative isn’t quite what you need, the Mathematical Symbols page lists every related character on the site — including Plus Sign and Product. The related-symbols grid below also surfaces the closest sibling characters.

How to Use Partial Derivative Symbol

HTML: ∂
CSS: content: '\\2202';
JavaScript: '\\u2202'
Unicode: U+2202