Tap a character and it's on your clipboard right away. Then just paste it wherever you're writing.
Each tap adds the character to your text and copies everything.
It's a tiny raised 2, written ², that sits next to a number or a letter and means "multiply this by itself". So 5² is just 5 × 5, which gives 25.
The name comes from geometry. Draw a square with sides of 5 and you can fit exactly 25 little unit squares inside it. The symbol is the shorthand for that picture.
Technically it's a character called Superscript Two, code point U+00B2. It has been around since the early days of Unicode, so nearly every font, phone and browser knows how to draw it.
4 rows of 4 squares each. Count them, or just write 4².
You've probably met it in more places than you remember. Here are six where the ² does the heavy lifting.
Side of 6? The area is 6 × 6 = 36 square units.
3² + 4² = 9 + 16 = 25, and 5² is exactly 25. Hello, right angle.
Double the radius and the area doesn't double. It quadruples.
Speed is squared, which is why a crash at 100 km/h is far worse than at 50.
Einstein's famous one. The speed of light, squared, is a huge number.
The x² is what gives the graph its curve, a parabola.
Can't use ² where you're typing? These all say the same thing. Tap any row to copy it.
Anywhere something gets multiplied by itself, which turns out to be nearly everywhere.
Flat sizes, paint coverage, flooring, garden plots. If it covers a surface, it's in square units.
Acceleration is distance per second, per second. That second shows up twice, hence the square.
Variance and R² both lean on it. Squaring keeps negatives from cancelling out positives.
Power lost as heat in a wire grows with the square of the current. Double the current, four times the heat.
From the first quadratic to the last exam, this little 2 turns up on nearly every page.
Country sizes, population density, city footprints. Column headers love a tidy ².
The quick way is the copy box above. If you'd rather type it from your keyboard, pick your setup.
Hold Alt, type 0178 on the number pad, then let go. No number pad? Open Character Map, or use the box above.
Search "superscript two" in the picker and double-click it. With the Unicode Hex Input keyboard enabled, hold Option and type 00B2.
Type the 2, select it, press the shortcut. It's formatting, so it won't survive a paste into plain text.
Then type 00b2 and press Enter. Works in most GTK apps.
Phone keyboards rarely put ² on the main layout. Copy it once from the box above, then save it as a text shortcut (for example, typing "sq2" expands to ²) in your keyboard settings. After that it's two taps.