The registered trademark symbol, ®, is a typographic symbol that provides notice that the preceding word or symbol is a trademark or service mark that has been registered with a national trademark office. A trademark is a symbol, word, or words legally registered or established by use as representing a company, product or service.^[1][2]

Unregistered trademarks can instead be marked with the trademark symbol, ™, while unregistered service marks are marked with the service mark symbol, ℠. The proper manner to display these symbols is immediately following the mark; the symbol is commonly in superscript style, but that is not legally required. In many jurisdictions, only registered trademarks confer easily defended legal rights.^[3]

In the US, the registered trademark symbol was originally introduced in the Trademark Act of 1946.^{[citation needed]}

Because the ® symbol is not commonly available on typewriters (or ASCII), it was common to approximate it with the characters (R) (or (r)).^[a][b] An example of a legal equivalent is the phrase Registered, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which may be abbreviated to Reg U.S. Pat & TM Off.^[5] in the US.^[2]

Computer usage

The registered trademark character was added to several extended ASCII character sets, including ISO-8859-1 from which it was inherited by Unicode as U+00AE ® REGISTERED SIGN.^[6]

Related and similar symbols

• The trademark symbol, ™, used for unregistered trademarks
• The service mark symbol, ℠, used for unregistered service marks
• The copyright symbol, ©
• The sound recording copyright symbol, ℗
• The Orthodox Union hechsher symbol, Ⓤ