Degree Celsius

Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, proposed his scale in 1742 with water boiling at 0 and freezing at 100. The French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin published a reversed version in 1743, and Carl Linnaeus turned Celsius’s scale the familiar way round in 1744, the year Celsius died.

℃ as a single character exists to match older East Asian encodings. Unicode recommends the two-character form instead: °C, a degree sign then a C.