Accent keyboard

How this keyboard works

Type your text in the box, and tap an accented letter whenever you need one. The letter is added where you are typing rather than copied on its own. When the word or sentence is finished, press Copy text once and the whole thing goes to your clipboard.

That one change is the point of this page. Copying letters one at a time means five trips to the clipboard to write Ångström. Here you build it and copy once.

Why accents matter more than they look

In several languages the accent is not decoration, it changes the word. In Spanish, año means year and ano means something entirely different. In French, ou means or and où means where. In German, dropping an umlaut turns schwül into schwul. Getting these right is the difference between looking careful and looking careless, particularly in a name.

Typing accents without this page

Windows

Windows has no built in accent key on the standard layout. Your options are the Alt codes listed in the Alt code finder, or switching to the United States International keyboard layout in Settings. That layout turns the apostrophe and quote keys into dead keys, so pressing the apostrophe and then E produces é.

Mac

Macs make this easy. Hold the letter key down for a moment and a small menu of accented versions appears, then press the matching number. Holding E offers è, é, ê, ë and ē. There is also the Option method: Option and E, then the letter, gives you an acute accent, and Option and N, then the letter, gives you a tilde.

iPhone and Android

Both work the same way as the Mac. Press and hold a vowel on the on screen keyboard and the accented versions slide out above your finger. Slide onto the one you want and let go. Holding N gives ñ, holding C gives ç, and holding A gives à, á, â, ä, å and ã.

Which letters are here

The set above covers the accented letters used in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and the Nordic languages: acute, grave, circumflex, umlaut, tilde, cedilla and ring, in both capital and small forms. That is enough for names, addresses, product listings and ordinary writing in any of those languages.

If you need something outside that set, such as Greek letters or mathematical notation, the full symbol library has 272 characters across twelve categories.

Will accented letters break anything?

Almost never, and not in any system built this century. These are standard Unicode characters, so they work in Word, Excel, Google Docs, email and modern websites exactly like ordinary letters.

Two places still deserve care. Some older booking and banking systems strip accents from names, so the spelling on a ticket may not match your passport. And web addresses handle accents poorly, so it is safer to keep them out of a URL slug even when the page title uses them.