Accent Keyboard
424 accented characters across 7 languages, drawn as what they are: base letters down the side, marks across the top. An empty compartment means no such character exists.
every accented letter
424 an empty compartment means no such character existsFrench
32 used when writing FrenchSpanish
14 used when writing SpanishGerman
7 used when writing GermanPortuguese
24 used when writing PortugueseItalian
12 used when writing ItalianPolish
18 used when writing PolishCzech
30 used when writing CzechEvery character here is a Latin letter with a mark on it, which is why a dead key can reach them all without changing your keyboard. An alphabet that replaces the keyboard instead, Greek or Cyrillic, needs its own layout: the key maps are here.
Most Used Accented Letters
Click any letter to copy it.
How to Type Accented Letters
An accent is not a separate character stuck onto a letter: é is a single Unicode codepoint, distinct from e. That is why searching for a name spelled with accents fails when the accents are wrong, and why copying the correct character matters more than it looks.
Filter by language to see only the letters that language actually uses, or by base letter to see every accented form of a, e, i, o, u and the rest.
The faster methods, once you type accents often
On a Mac, hold the letter key: a small menu of accented forms appears and you pick one with a number key. There is also the classic dead-key route, Option+E then e for é, Option+N then n for ñ.
On Windows, the US International keyboard layout turns the apostrophe, quote, backtick, tilde and caret into dead keys, so typing ' then e gives é. It is a settings change rather than an install, and it is the right answer if you write in an accented language daily.
On a phone, press and hold the base letter on the on-screen keyboard and the accented options appear above your thumb. This works on both iOS and Android with no extra keyboard installed.
Categories explained
French (32)
French uses five marks. The acute sits on e alone (é). The grave falls on a, e and u, usually to separate words that would otherwise be spelled alike, such as ou and où. The circumflex can sit on any vowel and often marks an s that dropped out of the old spelling: forêt, hôpital. The diaeresis splits a vowel pair that would otherwise be read as one sound (naïve, Noël), and the cedilla under c keeps it soft before a, o and u. Capitals keep their accents in careful setting: À, É, Ç.
Spanish (14)
Spanish needs three marks and uses them sparingly. The acute marks the stressed syllable when it breaks the default rule, and it also separates pairs that are otherwise identical: si and sí, el and él. The tilde makes a separate letter, ñ, which sorts after n in its own right. The diaeresis appears only on u between g and e or i, in words like pingüino, to say the u is pronounced. The inverted question and exclamation marks, ¿ and ¡, open a sentence rather than mark a letter, and they live with the punctuation.
German (7)
German has three umlauted vowels, ä, ö and ü, and the sharp s, ß. The umlaut is not decoration: it changes the word, as in Mutter and Mütter. Where a keyboard cannot produce them the standard substitution is ae, oe, ue and ss, which is why a German web address often reads muenchen rather than münchen. ß gained an official capital form, ẞ, in 2008, and it never begins a word, so the capital is only ever needed when a whole word is set in capitals.
Portuguese (24)
Portuguese uses the acute for a stressed open vowel and the circumflex for a stressed close one, which is why the same word can carry either mark in European and Brazilian spelling. The tilde on a and o marks a nasal vowel, as in não and põe, and it is the mark most often missing when Portuguese text has been stripped. The grave marks a contraction, almost always à, and the cedilla keeps c soft before a, o and u.
Italian (12)
Italian uses two marks, the grave and the acute, and they land on the last vowel of the word: città, perché, più. The grave is far more common. The acute appears on a closed e, in perché, ventitré and a short list of others, and on rare occasions elsewhere. Inside a word a mark shows up only in dictionaries, where it is printed to teach the stress and then dropped in ordinary writing.
Polish (18)
Polish treats its accented forms as separate letters of the alphabet, each with its own place in a sorted list rather than a variant of the base letter. The ogonek, a hook under a and e, gives ą and ę, both nasal. The acute softens c, n, s and z into ć, ń, ś and ź, and also gives ó, which is pronounced like u. The dot above gives ż, and a stroke through l gives ł, whose sound is closer to English w than to l.
Czech (30)
Czech separates two jobs. The acute marks a long vowel: á, é, í, ó, ú and ý. The caron, called the háček, marks a different consonant altogether: č, ď, ň, ř, š, ť and ž, plus ě on the vowel. The ring above appears on one letter, ů, a long u that grew out of an old diphthong, which is why a word can hold ú at the start and ů in the middle. Ř carries a sound that almost no other language writes.
Things that go wrong with accents
Composed and decomposed forms
The same accented letter can be stored two ways. NFC, the composed form, is a single codepoint: é is U+00E9. NFD, the decomposed form, is the base letter followed by a combining mark: e at U+0065 then U+0301. They look identical on screen and they are not equal as strings.
This is the source of a whole class of bugs. A filename copied from a Mac often arrives decomposed, because macOS historically normalised to NFD, while the same name typed on Windows is composed. Search misses, duplicate records and failed logins all follow from it.
Everything on this page is the composed form, which is what NFC normalisation produces and what almost every system expects. If you are handling text from mixed sources, normalise to NFC on the way in rather than comparing raw.
References
Background on how these characters are defined and combined:
- Diacritic — what the marks are and what they do
- Latin-1 Supplement — the block holding most Western European letters
- Unicode Normalization Forms — the composed and decomposed forms explained
- Unicode Character Search — look up any accented letter
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I type é on a keyboard?
On Mac, hold the e key and pick from the menu that appears, or press Option+E then e. On Windows with the US International layout, press the apostrophe then e; without it, use Alt + 0233. On any device, copying the character from this page always works.
How do I type ñ?
On Mac, Option+N then n. On Windows, Alt + 0241 on the numeric keypad, or the tilde key then n with the US International layout. On a phone, hold the n key on the on-screen keyboard.
Are É and é the same character?
No. They are separate Unicode codepoints, the same way E and e are. Case-insensitive search treats them as equivalent, but a byte comparison does not, so copy the case you actually need.
Why does my accented text turn into strange characters?
That is an encoding mismatch: text written as UTF-8 is being read as something else, which is why é so often appears as é. The fix is to set the reading end to UTF-8, not to retype the text.
Should I use accents in an email address or a URL?
They are permitted but still handled inconsistently by older mail servers and link parsers. For anything that has to work everywhere, keep the address plain and use accents in the display name.
What is the difference between an umlaut and a diaeresis?
They are the same two dots doing different jobs. In German an umlaut marks a changed vowel, as in über. In French and English a diaeresis says two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately, as in naïve. Unicode gives them one codepoint each.
Can I search for accented letters here?
Yes. Search by the letter, by its Unicode name, or by language: typing "french" filters to the letters French uses. The language and letter tabs do the same without typing.
Why do some languages share the same letters?
Because they share the Latin alphabet and the same marks. é is used in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Czech and others, so it appears under each of those filters. The character is identical; only its role in the language differs.
Related Tools
1,164 symbols. 341 Windows alt codes. 424 accented characters. 102 characters are drawn by your own system emoji font.
Nothing in this case ever moves. Coordinates are frozen: new characters are appended to the end of a drawer, never inserted. Search dims, it does not reorder. This page runs with the network off.