Small Roman Numeral Five Hundred

Small Roman Numeral Five Hundred at U+217E represents the lowercase Roman numeral for 500, equivalent to a small-letter form of D used as a number sign. It is part of the Number Forms block, which contains precomposed Roman numerals and related numeric symbols rather than ordinary alphabetic letters. In practice, it appears mainly in typography and encoded text that needs Roman numerals to behave as single number characters, such as catalog entries, scholarly references, tables, or compatibility data inherited from older character sets. A document might use it in a sequence of lowercase Roman numerals for front matter, outlines, or labeled items, though ordinary letters are far more common for this purpose. It is easy to confuse with the Latin small letter d, and many fonts draw the two nearly identically. For searchable, editable text, the regular letter d is usually preferred when spelling Roman numerals such as d, dc, or dcc; this character is most appropriate when preserving a source that specifically encoded the Roman numeral symbol.