How to type accents on Android (Gboard and Samsung)

Android has the most flexible accent system of any platform, and almost nobody knows why. The popup you get when you hold a letter is not fixed: Gboard builds it from every Latin-script language you have switched on. Learn that one fact and you can make almost any letter appear on your English keyboard.

The basic move

Touch a letter and keep your finger down. A row of variants appears above the key. Slide sideways onto the one you want and lift. Google’s help page puts it in one line: to find accents and more options, touch and hold a key.

Tap Shift first if you want the capital. The popup then offers the same set in uppercase.

What the English keyboard gives you by default

The minimum set, which is what ships in the open-source keyboard Gboard is built from, covers only eight letters. Current Gboard shows a wider set on most devices. Both are listed here so you know what to expect either way.

Hold	Guaranteed minimum	Usually shown now
a	à á â ä æ ã å ā	à á â ã ä å ā ą æ
e	é è ê ë ē	è é ê ë ē ę ė ě
i	í î ï ī ì	ì í î ï ī į ı
o	ó ô ö ò œ ø ō õ	ò ó ô õ ö ø ō œ
u	ú û ü ù ū	ù ú û ü ū ų ů
s	ß	ś š ş ș ß

Hold	Guaranteed minimum	Usually shown now
n	ñ	ñ ń ň
c	ç	ç ć č ĉ
y	nothing	ý ÿ ŷ
z	nothing	ź ż ž
l	nothing	ł only with a language that uses it

So é, ñ, ü, ç and ß are all available out of the box on any Android phone. ł is the well-known gap.

Adding a language changes the popups

This is the part worth remembering. Gboard merges the accent sets of every Latin-script language you enable, and puts that language’s own letter first in the row.

To add one: open the keyboard, tap the gear icon, choose Languages, then Add keyboard, pick the language and its layout, then Done. Switch between them by touching and holding the space bar.

Enable this	And you gain
Polish	ł on l, ą on a, ę on e, ś on s, ć on c, ż and ź on z, ń on n
Czech	ě on e, ů on u, ř on r, ď on d, ť on t, š on s, č on c, ž on z
Turkish	ğ on g, ı on i, ş on s, ç on c
Hungarian	ő on o, ű on u
Swedish	ð and ď on d, ř on r, ť and þ on t, ý and ÿ on y, ł on l
Danish	ð on d, ý and ÿ on y, ł on l
German	ä ö ü as primary keys on QWERTZ, plus ś and š on s
Spanish	the full accented vowel set first in each popup, plus ª and º

The rule is simple: if a character is missing, add the language that uses it. You do not have to type in that language or even switch to its keyboard; enabling it is enough. One limitation is that Gboard cannot merge languages from different scripts, so a Latin keyboard and a Cyrillic or Greek one stay separate.

Numbers and symbols

Switch to the ?123 layer and hold there too.

Hold	Variants
?	¿
!	¡
$	¢ £ € ¥ ₱
%	per mille
+	±
*	† ‡ ★
<	‹ ≤ «
>	› ≥ »
1	¹ ½ ⅓ ¼ ⅛
2 and 3	² ⅔ and ³ ¾ ⅜

The base currency key follows your locale, so in the eurozone it is the euro with the dollar moved into the popup, and in India it is the rupee. Holding the period on the main layer opens the full punctuation set.

Samsung Keyboard

Samsung ships its own keyboard on Galaxy phones and tablets, and it behaves close enough to Gboard that the technique transfers: hold a letter, slide, release. The per-key sets are broadly the same, with e offering è é ê ë, n offering ñ ń ň and a offering à á â ã ä å ā ą æ.

Three Samsung-specific settings matter.

Layout. Some Galaxy owners find that only a handful of accents appear until they select the English (US), International style layout in the keyboard settings. If your popups look thin, check this first.

Alternative characters. Settings, then General management, then Samsung Keyboard settings, then Layout. The Alternative characters toggle controls whether letters also show number and punctuation hints on long press. Turning it on does not remove the accents, it adds to the popup.

Touch and hold delay. In the same settings under Swipe, touch and feedback, you can set the delay to Short, Medium, Long or a custom value. If your accents never appear, the delay may be longer than you are holding.

Samsung does not let you reorder the variants. The order follows the keyboard language, so changing the language is the only way to move your preferred letter to the front.

SwiftKey and other keyboards

SwiftKey, and most third-party keyboards, use the same long-press model. What differs is the per-key set and whether enabled languages merge into it, which is not guaranteed outside Gboard. If a keyboard is missing letters you need and offers no way to add them, switching to Gboard is usually faster than fighting it.

When a character is in no popup at all

A few letters, such as the Vietnamese ơ and ư or the capital ẞ, are not in any English-keyboard popup. Your options are to enable that language’s keyboard, use a clipboard app, or copy the character from Accent Letter and paste it.

Related guides

iOS uses the same gesture but with a fixed set that does not respond to added languages; the full comparison is in How to type accents on iPhone and iPad. On the desktop, How to type accents on Windows (Alt codes and layouts) covers Alt codes, which require a numeric keypad with Num Lock on, and How to type accents on a Mac (Option key and press-and-hold) covers the Option key. How to type accents on a Chromebook handles ChromeOS, and How to type accents on any keyboard puts all four systems side by side. Every set of shortcuts on this site was checked against vendor documentation and the keyboard definition files themselves. If you need to strip accents out again before sending text to a system that mangles them, use Remove accents from text, and see Common accent mistakes and the confusable characters for which substitutions are safe.