Ordinal indicator
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The symbols º and ª are ordinal indicators, used to denote ordinal numbers in some languages.
The equivalent of the adjective "12th" in the Spanish, Portuguese and Italian languages is "12º" when the noun being modified is of masculine grammatical gender. The corresponding symbol is used in "12ª" when the noun is feminine.
The World Wide Web Consortium and the Unicode Consortium have deprecated the the use of the characters º and ª whenever superscript markup is available.[1] (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr20/) For example, in XHTML 12<sup>o</sup> should be used instead of 12º.
The symbol º also appears in the numero symbol (№).
Note: The degree symbol ° is different from º, although its appearance is almost identical in some fonts.