Diacritical Marks: Copy and Type Accent Letters

A practical guide to diacritical marks

A diacritical mark modifies a letter. The acute in é, the tilde in ñ and the cedilla in ç are small, but leaving one out can change the spelling of a word or a person's name. Choose the form your text actually requires; visually similar marks are not interchangeable.

Is a diacritic the same as an accent?

“Accent” often means a mark above a vowel, such as á or è. “Diacritic” is the broader term: it also covers marks below letters and other distinctions. The word accent can also describe a way of speaking, which is a different use of the word. Compare diacritics, accents and Unicode marks. A mark's meaning depends on the language and writing system.

Above, below and through a letter

Compare the acute in á, the dot below in ạ and the cedilla in ç. Marks can combine: ấ contains both a circumflex and an acute. A stroke through a letter, as in ł or ø, looks like an added mark but is not necessarily encoded as a removable diacritic. Our letter pages keep such related forms separate.

The mark reference connects each mark name to examples. The A page includes stacked marks, whileC makes the difference between acute, caron and cedilla easy to compare.

One visible letter can contain several code points

é can be U+00E9, one precomposed character, or e followed by U+0301, a combining acute accent. These encodings are canonically equivalent, although their code-point counts differ. NFC normalization prefers composed forms where available; NFD separates canonical components. Not every combination has a precomposed form: Q with an acute is a sequence. Fonts determine how neatly a mark attaches. Read about font rendering and accessible character display.

Copy a character, then paste it where you need it

Click or tap the large character button. With a keyboard, focus the button and press Enter or Space. A “Copied” tile and a short confirmation appear after copying succeeds. Paste into your document with Ctrl+V, Command+V or the paste command on your device. Details is a separate action for the technical record. If automatic copying is unavailable, use the labelled manual copy field.

Typing routes for different devices

• Windows: supported leading-zero Alt codes need a numeric keypad and a compatible application/code page. For á, the CP1252 mapping is Alt+0225. A Unicode decimal number is not a universal Windows shortcut.
• Word and supported classic Outlook editors: type the hexadecimal code, select it if needed, then press Alt+X. For á, use 00E1.
• macOS: in supported apps, hold a letter to choose an available accent. Character Viewer helps with less common forms.
• Mobile: long-press a letter on a keyboard that offers variants. Available choices depend on the keyboard and language; copying covers characters that the keyboard does not list.

See the verified Alt-code reference and thedevice typing guide and sources for application-specific instructions.

Characters and code notation are different things

For á, U+00E1 identifies the Unicode character. HTML accepts the numeric references á and á. JavaScript can use \u00E1 or \u{E1} inside a string. A CSS string can use \00E1 ; a trailing space terminates the hexadecimal escape. Pasting those notations into ordinary text does not automatically convert them into a letter.

Languages use marks differently

A mark can belong to an alphabet letter, indicate a tone, or supply optional pronunciation information. German umlaut, Vietnamese tone marks and Arabic vowel pointing need different explanations. Start with the language and writing system guides; the complete language ledger also includes languages without a published guide.

Marks can affect alphabetical order too. Swedish places å, ä and ö after z; sorting by Unicode number alone does not reproduce that order.

Inspect a character or an exact sequence

The Unicode explorer searches names and code points across the full candidate collection. Paste a difficult string into the inspector to identify its scalars, or compare forms with the normalizer. These tools expose the stored text; a dictionary or orthography reference still decides correct spelling.

The Unicode Standard's discussion of letters and marks explains why encoded character identity, typography and language use must be considered separately.

Common questions

When plain text is needed, remove accents and diacritics from text with the browser tool.