Last checked by the TextEditor.com team
Accented letters for each language
Every language that uses the Latin alphabet adds its own marks to the plain letters a to z. This table lists the extra small letters of each language. The language buttons in the tool above show the capitals too.
| Language | Letters | Good to know |
|---|---|---|
| French | àâæçéèêëîïôœùûüÿ | The letter ÿ is rare. It shows up in a few place names, like L'Haÿ-les-Roses near Paris. |
| Spanish | áéíñóúü | Ñ is a letter of its own in the Spanish alphabet. It comes right after N. |
| German | äöüß ẞ | The capital ẞ came to Unicode in 2008. German spelling rules have allowed it since 2017. Swiss German writes ss instead of ß. |
| Portuguese | áàâãçéêíóôõú | The tilde on ã and õ shows that the vowel is said through the nose. |
| Italian | àèéìòù | Accents nearly always sit on the last vowel of a word, as in città and perché. |
| Polish | ąćęłńóśźż | Ł sounds like the English w. The tail on ą and ę is called an ogonek. |
| Czech | áčďéěíňóřšťúůýž | Ů never starts a word. At the start of a word, Czech writes ú instead. |
| Hungarian | áéíóöőúüű | Ő and ű have a double acute accent. Hungarian is the main language that uses it. |
| Turkish | çğıöşü İ | Dotted and dotless i are two letters. Small i goes with capital İ, and small ı goes with capital I. |
| Romanian | ăâîșț | Ș and ț take a comma below. Unicode only added the comma forms in 1999, so older text often has ş and ţ with a cedilla. |
| Danish and Norwegian | æøå | Å replaced the old spelling aa: in Norway in 1917, in Denmark in 1948. Some town names still use aa. |
| Swedish | åäö | Å, Ä and Ö come at the end of the alphabet, after Z. |
| Icelandic | áðéíóúýþæö | Ð (eth) and Þ (thorn) were also used in Old English. |
| Vietnamese | ăâđêôơư | Six tones are shown with five marks, so one vowel can carry two marks, as in ế or ặ. In all there are 67 small letters with marks. |
The lists come from the Unicode CLDR project, which records the letters each language needs. Letters used only in foreign words, like the ñ in a Spanish name written in English, are not counted.
How to type accents on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android
You don't need a new keyboard to type accents. Every system has a built in way. Pick yours below.
Windows
- Alt codes. Turn on Num Lock, hold Alt and type 0233 on the number pad. Let go of Alt and é appears. The code must be typed on the number pad, not on the row of digits above the letters.
- The US International keyboard. Add it in Settings, under Time and language, then Language and region. On this layout the ' " ` ^ and ~ keys wait for the next letter. Type ' and then e for é, or ~ and then n for ñ. For a plain apostrophe, type ' and then Space.
- The symbol panel. Press the Windows key and the period key, open the Ω tab, and pick Latin symbols.
Mac
- Press and hold. Hold down a letter key, like e. A small menu shows its accented forms with numbers. Press the number or click the letter.
- Option keys. Press Option+E, let go, then type e for é. Option+` gives a grave accent, Option+I a circumflex, Option+U an umlaut and Option+N a tilde. Option+C types ç and Option+S types ß in one step.
iPhone and Android
- Touch and hold. Hold a letter on the keyboard, like e. A row of accented letters pops up. Slide your finger to the one you want and let go.
- Add a language. If a letter is missing, add a keyboard for that language. On iPhone, go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards. In Gboard on Android, open its settings and choose Languages.
When you click a letter in the tool, the line under the buttons shows its Alt code, its US International keys and its Mac keys, if it has them. For a full on-screen keyboard in many alphabets, try the online Unicode keyboard.
What the accent marks are called
The small marks on letters are called diacritics. Many of them have older names from the languages that first used them.
Some names tell a story. Cedilla comes from an old Spanish word for "little z", because the mark started as a small z written under the c. Háček is Czech for "little hook", and ogonek is Polish for "little tail".
The umlaut and the diaeresis look exactly the same, and Unicode treats them as one mark. The name depends on the job. In German, the umlaut changes the sound of the vowel: ü is not said like u. In English and French, the diaeresis says that a vowel starts a new sound, as in naïve or Noël. Writing ü as ue is fine in German, but not in French.
Why é is sometimes two characters
Unicode can store é in two ways. It can be one character, U+00E9. It can also be a plain e followed by a combining acute accent, U+0301, which the screen draws on top of the e. Both look the same, but to a computer they are different text.
This is why a name with an accent sometimes fails to match in a search, or a file can't be found after it moves to another computer. Unicode calls the one character form "composed", or NFC. The two character form is "decomposed", or NFD. Wikipedia's page on Unicode equivalence explains the rules in detail.
Composed (NFC): 4 characters
Decomposed (NFD): 5 characters
Type or paste a word. The orange cards are the ones that change between the two forms.
Most text on the web uses the composed form, and so do the letters on this page. Search engines and good apps treat both forms as equal. Simple tools often don't: a spreadsheet filter, a password check or a script that compares file names. If two names that look the same won't match, paste them above and convert both to the same form.
Letterlike symbols: №, ℃, ™ and friends
The Letterlike Symbols block runs from U+2100 to U+214F. It holds signs that are made of letters, like the numero sign and the trade mark sign. Most of them have been in Unicode since version 1.1 in 1993.
Many of these are only there so old character sets could be turned into Unicode without losing anything. Unicode's own data links most of them to a plain form: ℃ to °C, and № to No. ℃ is one character, but "°C" written with a degree sign and a C is easier to search for, and more fonts draw it well.
Three of them go further. The ohm sign Ω, the kelvin sign K and the angstrom sign Å are exact copies of the Greek Ω, the letter K and the Swedish Å. Convert text to the composed form in the tool above and they turn into those letters. The numero sign № is common in Russian and other languages, where people write it before a number. The ℮ sign on food packs in the European Union means the amount is an average.
The double struck letters ℝ, ℕ and ℤ are for sets of numbers in math. You find them, with the rest of that alphabet, on the page of math symbols. For bold, script and other letter styles made from Unicode, use the font converter. Small raised letters are on the superscript page, and the case converter switches text between upper and lower case.