How to type accents

There are four reliable ways to put an accented letter into your text, and the right one depends on the keyboard in front of you. On Windows you hold the Alt key and type a number on the numeric keypad: Alt+0233 gives é and Alt+0241 gives ñ. Those codes come from Windows code page 1252, so they only reach the Latin-1 characters, and they need a real numeric keypad with Num Lock switched on. Inside Microsoft Word and Outlook you can skip the keypad entirely: type the hexadecimal code point, press Alt+X, and the code turns into the character. Word also keeps its own two-step shortcuts, such as Ctrl+' followed by e.

On a Mac the Option key carries the accents. Option+e sets an acute accent and waits for the next letter, Option+u sets an umlaut, Option+n sets a tilde, and Option+c types ç straight away. If you would rather not memorise combinations, hold the base letter down instead: a small menu appears and you pick the accented form with a number key or the pointer. Phones work the same way. On iPhone, and on Android with Gboard, you press and hold a, e, i, o, u, n or c, slide to the form you want and release. Adding a language keyboard brings extra characters into those menus.

Linux and Chromebook users have the Compose key. Enable it in the keyboard settings, then press Compose followed by the accent and the letter, for example Compose ' e for é. Ctrl+Shift+U plus the hexadecimal code works in most GTK applications and on ChromeOS. Google Docs adds Insert then Special characters, where you can search by name or draw the shape by hand. And when none of that is convenient, copying is faster than any shortcut: every character on this site copies with one tap. The guides below cover each device and app in detail, with the keys checked against the vendor documentation.