How to type O with Diaeresis
To type O with Diaeresis (ö), press Alt + 0246 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + U, O on Mac, or write ö in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00F6 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00f6 on Linux, or 00f6 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Latin Small Letter O With Diaeresis
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00F6
- Windows
- Alt + 0246
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0246 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + U, O | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ö | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00F6 | LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS |
Other accents symbols
ö 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.
ö has a decomposed form: it can also be written as U+006F Latin Small Letter O, U+0308 Combining Diaeresis. The two look identical and are not equal as strings, which is why a search for a word containing ö 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 Ö (U+00D6). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.
Typing ö without switching keyboard
ö is the letter O 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 O 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 o: 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 ö costs two keystrokes from then on rather than four digits on a numeric keypad.
How O with Diaeresis behaves in software
ö 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 O with Diaeresis
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00F6 |
| Decimal | 246 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C3 B6 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 F6 |
| HTML entity | ö |
| HTML numeric | ö or ö |
| CSS | \00F6 |
| JavaScript | \u00F6 |
| Python | \u00F6 |
| URL-encoded | %C3%B6 |
| SVG | 00F6.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ö arrives as ö
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 B6 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+00F6.