How to Type Italian Accents
The 12 characters Italian uses, each one to copy, and the keyboard sequence that types it without copying.
Italian
12 8 with a Windows shortcut that worksHow to type Italian accents on a keyboard
Of the 12 characters on this page, 12 can be typed on a Mac's default ABC layout. On Windows, 12 have a Word and Outlook shortcut and 8 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 |
| an acute accent | é | Option + E, then e | Ctrl + ', then e |
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.
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.
This group holds 12 characters. They run from U+00C0 to U+00F9, close enough together to share a neighbourhood but not a single contiguous run. They are drawn from Latin-1 Supplement (12) in the Unicode Standard, which is what decides how each one is encoded and how software sorts and compares it.
Italian takes two of the marks on this site and shares two of them with Portuguese, the closest set to it here. The one it leans on that fewest of its neighbours do is the a grave accent.
All 12 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 that block alone.
8 of the 12 have a Windows Alt code that works as printed. The rest are copy and paste, which works the same everywhere.
Of the 12, 6 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. 8 of them have a guide page as well, with the Windows, Mac and HTML route written out.
Other languages
French (32)
32 characters, and the a grave accent as well.
Portuguese (24)
24 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.
Spanish (14)
14 characters, and the an acute accent as well.