How to type E with Diaeresis
To type E with Diaeresis (ë), press Alt + 0235 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + U, E on Mac, or write ë in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00EB directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00eb on Linux, or 00eb then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Latin Small Letter E With Diaeresis
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00EB
- Windows
- Alt + 0235
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0235 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + U, E | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ë | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00EB | LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS |
Other accents symbols
ë lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.
ë has a decomposed form: it can also be written as U+0065 Latin Small Letter E, U+0308 Combining Diaeresis. The two look identical and are not equal as strings, which is why a search for a word containing ë sometimes fails against text that was typed on a different system. Everything on this site uses the single-codepoint (NFC) form shown here.
Its uppercase counterpart is Ë (U+00CB). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.
Typing ë without switching keyboard
ë is the letter E carrying a diaeresis, and it is needed in French, Spanish and German. It is one character rather than two: a spell checker treats it as a letter of those alphabets, not as E with something added.
Both of the routes worth knowing compose the letter rather than looking it up. On a Mac press Option + U, let go, then press e: nothing appears until the second key, because the first one is a dead key waiting for a letter to sit under. On Windows the same idea needs the United States-International layout, which turns Shift + apostrophe into the same dead key. Add that layout once under Language and region, and ë costs two keystrokes from then on rather than four digits on a numeric keypad.
How E with Diaeresis behaves in software
ë takes one column in a terminal. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.
Every way to write E with Diaeresis
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00EB |
| Decimal | 235 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C3 AB |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 EB |
| HTML entity | ë |
| HTML numeric | ë or ë |
| CSS | \00EB |
| JavaScript | \u00EB |
| Python | \u00EB |
| URL-encoded | %C3%AB |
| SVG | 00EB.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ë arrives as ë
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 AB are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00EB.