How to Type the Water Symbol

The water symbol, typically represented by two wavy horizontal lines, is not a standard character in most font sets or character encoding systems like ASCII or Unicode. However, Unicode does include a set of characters for alchemical symbols which sometimes are used in a way similar to the water symbol. The closest representation in Unicode is the “ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR WATER” which is represented by the code point U+1F700.

Here’s how you can type the alchemical symbol for water depending on your operating system:

On Windows:

Press and hold the Alt key.
Type 128768 on the numeric keypad (make sure Num Lock is on).
Release the Alt key.

(Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work in all applications because this Unicode character is in a higher range that’s not supported by the traditional Alt code method.)

On Mac:

Open the Emoji & Symbols viewer (Edit > Emoji & Symbols, or use the shortcut Control-Command-Space).
In the search bar, type Alchemical Symbols or the Unicode value 1F700.
Select the water symbol and insert it into your text.

On Linux:

Press Ctrl+Shift+U to start the Unicode input.
Type 1F700 and press Enter or Space.

On Web Pages:

If you’re working with HTML, you can use the Unicode character in an HTML entity:

&#x1F700;

On Mobile Devices (iOS and Android):

You can use the emoji keyboard to insert a water wave symbol that looks similar to the water alchemical symbol.
Search for “water” in your emoji keyboard, and choose the appropriate symbol.

Remember that the person or system you are communicating with needs to have fonts that support these higher Unicode characters for them to be displayed correctly.

For actual scientific or technical work, there might be specific symbols used to represent water, especially in chemical equations (H₂O), which can be typed using subscript features in your word processor or using specialized typesetting systems like LaTeX.