French accents and special letters

Spelling and status

The acute appears on é. Grave accents occur on à, è and ù, while circumflexes occur on â, ê, î, ô and û. A mark can distinguish words, as in sur and sûr. The diaeresis often separates the interpretation of adjacent vowels; its spelling depends on the word. Forms such as ä, ö and ÿ also occur in names and are not a promise that every vowel takes every accent. [16], [17], [18], [3]

Distinctions to preserve

Use ç, not Romanian ș, when a French word requires a cedilla. Œ and œ are ligature letters with their own code points; Unicode normalization does not turn œ into oe. The tables include æ and œ as useful special letters, not as accented vowels. Do not replace an accent with an apostrophe after the letter. [16], [17], [18], [3], [1], [2]

Typing and text forms

Copying is exact; preview circles are excluded. Compare normalization forms.

Word for Windows

Select a hex code, then Alt+X; repeat for each scalar.

Mac and mobile

Hold a letter for supported variants; use Character Viewer on Mac or a language keyboard on mobile.

HTML

Use UTF-8 text or the numeric references in Details, in order.

Full typing instructions ·HTML, CSS and JavaScript entry ·Verified Alt codes.

Sources and method

Usage statements link to the authority that supports their scope. Character names, categories, combining classes and normalization results come from the pinned Unicode data. A canonical decomposition does not establish language membership or spelling frequency.

Source access date: 2026-09-14.

• [16] OQLF: accents, diaereses and cedillas on capitals. French uppercase diacritics and orthographic categories.
• [17] Académie française: accented letters and distinctions. French examples in which accents distinguish words, including mur and mûr.
• [18] Académie française: tréma. French diaeresis and the scope of the 1990 spelling rectifications.
• [3] Unicode 17: Latin, Greek and combining marks. Sections 7.1, 7.2, 7.8 and 7.9: encoded distinctions, script conventions and glyph variation, not a complete orthography.
• [1] Unicode Character Database 17.0.0.
• [2] Unicode normalization, UAX #15.
• [9] CLDR 48.2 locale exemplars. Supplementary inventory checks against direct main and auxiliary exemplar sets. Exemplars do not establish full spelling or pronunciation rules.
• [10] Microsoft: Unicode character entry in Word.
• [11] Apple: enter characters with accent marks.
• [12] Google: use Gboard.
• [13] Unicode: fonts and keyboards FAQ.
• [14] HTML numeric character references.

Read the editorial method and inspect the underlying datasets.