How to Type French Accents
The 32 characters French uses, each one to copy, and the keyboard sequence that types it without copying.
Vous cherchez comment taper ces caractères ? Cette page existe en français, avec les codes Alt et les touches mortes.
French
32 21 with a Windows shortcut that worksHow to type French accents on a keyboard
Of the 32 characters on this page, 32 can be typed on a Mac's default ABC layout. On Windows, 32 have a Word and Outlook shortcut and 21 have an Alt code that works anywhere, which is the route when the keyboard has a numeric keypad.
A dead key is pressed and released before the letter, so it looks like nothing happened until you type the vowel. One row here is one rule: learn the acute and every acute letter follows.
| Mark | Example | Mac | Word and Outlook |
|---|---|---|---|
| a grave accent | à | Option + `, then a | Ctrl + `, then a |
| a circumflex accent | â | Option + I, then a | Ctrl + Shift + ^, then a |
| a cedilla | ç | Option + C | Ctrl + ,, then C |
| an acute accent | é | Option + E, then e | Ctrl + ', then e |
| a diaeresis | ë | Option + U, then e | Ctrl + Shift + :, then e |
| ae | æ | Option + ' | Ctrl + Shift + &, then A |
| oe | œ | Option + Q | Ctrl + Shift + &, then O |
Mac sequences are read off the layouts this machine runs, with UCKeyTranslate. The Word column is Microsoft's own table for Word and Outlook, not a Windows-wide shortcut.
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.
This group holds 32 characters. They run from U+00C0 to U+0178, close enough together to share a neighbourhood but not a single contiguous run. They are drawn from Latin-1 Supplement (29), Latin Extended-A (3) in the Unicode Standard, which is what decides how each one is encoded and how software sorts and compares it.
French takes five of the marks on this site and shares four of them with Portuguese, the closest set to it here. The one it leans on that fewest of its neighbours do is the a cedilla.
Most of them, 29 of the 32, come from Latin-1 Supplement: the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. A block is an address rather than a category, and this group is drawn from 2 of them. The rest come from Latin Extended-A.
21 of the 32 have a Windows Alt code that works as printed. The rest are copy and paste, which works the same everywhere.
Of the 32, 14 have a Mac shortcut of their own. Everything else in this drawer is reached by copying it or by its codepoint, which works in every application on every system.
Every character below copies with one click. 21 of them have a guide page as well, with the Windows, Mac and HTML route written out.
Other languages
Portuguese (24)
24 characters, and the a cedilla as well.
Spanish (14)
14 characters, and the a diaeresis as well.
Italian (12)
12 characters, and the a grave accent as well.
Czech (30)
30 characters, and the an acute accent as well.
Polish (18)
18 characters, and the an acute accent as well.