How to type accents on iPhone and iPad

Typing accents on an iPhone or iPad needs no settings, no layouts and no codes. Apple’s own instruction is to “touch and hold the letter, number, or symbol that’s related to the character you want”, then slide your finger onto the option you want and release. The only thing worth learning is which keys hide what, because Apple does not publish that list anywhere.

How the popup works

Press a key and keep your finger down for roughly half a second. A strip of alternative characters appears above the key. Without lifting, slide sideways to the one you want and let go. Lift too early and you get the plain letter.

For capitals, tap Shift before you hold, or double tap Shift for Caps Lock. The popup then shows the capital versions in the same order.

Every letter key and what it hides

Some of these arrived with iOS 17, which more than doubled the number of letter variants on the English keyboard. If you are on an older release you will see the first group only.

Hold	Variants	Added in iOS 17
a	à á â ä æ ã å ā	ǎ ă ą
c	ç ć č	ċ
d	none	ď ð
e	è é ê ë ē ė ę	ě ẽ
g	none	ğ ġ
h	none	ħ
i	î ï í ī į ì	ı ĩ ǐ
k	none	ķ
l	ł	ľ ļ
n	ñ ń	ň ņ

Hold	Variants	Added in iOS 17
o	ô ö ò ó œ ø ō õ	ő ǒ
r	none	ř
s	ß ś š	ş ș
t	none	ț ť þ
u	û ü ù ú ū	ų ů ű ũ ǔ
w	none	ŵ
y	ÿ	ŷ ý
z	ž ź ż

The keys b, f, j, m, p, q, v and x have no popup at all on the English keyboard, in any version. So é comes from the e key, ñ from the n key, ü from u, ç from c, ß from s and ł from l. That covers Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese completely, and most of Polish.

Numbers and punctuation hide things too

Switch to the 123 layer and the same trick works there.

Hold	Variants
?	¿
!	¡
$	₽ ¥ € ¢ £ ₩
"	« » „ “ ”
'	backtick, ‘ and ’
.	…
-	en dash, em dash and the bullet
/	backslash
&	§
0	°

Two more worth knowing: holding % gives the per mille sign, and holding = gives the approximately-equal and not-equal signs. On the $ key the base character changes with your region, and whatever your local currency is takes its place with the dollar moving into the popup.

Adding a language keyboard

Unlike Android, the English iOS keyboard has a fixed set that does not grow when you add another language. What a second keyboard does give you is a different layout with the language’s own letters positioned more conveniently, and its own popup order.

Go to Settings, then General, then Keyboard, then Keyboards, then Add New Keyboard. Switch between them with the globe key beside the space bar.

The Spanish keyboard puts ñ on its own key. The German keyboard is QWERTZ with ß as a primary key. The French keyboard is AZERTY, where é and è are keys in their own right rather than popups. If you write in one of those languages regularly, the native layout is worth the muscle memory.

Text Replacement for anything that is missing

Some characters appear in no popup on any keyboard: the capital ẞ on older releases, arrows, and most currency symbols. Text Replacement solves all of them.

Go to Settings, then General, then Keyboard, then Text Replacement, then the plus button. Put the character itself in the Phrase field and a short trigger in the Shortcut field, for example xss. Tap Save. Now typing xss followed by a space swaps in the character. The list syncs through iCloud, so the same shortcuts work on your Mac and iPad. It is also the fastest way to insert a phrase you repeat, such as an email address.

With a hardware keyboard

The touch-and-hold popup does not appear when you type on a Magic Keyboard, a Smart Keyboard or any Bluetooth keyboard. Instead you get the Mac-style Option combinations, but only after you tell iOS which hardware layout you are on.

Go to Settings, then General, then Keyboard, then Hardware Keyboard. With the English (US) language keyboard, choose U.S. International PC or ABC Extended. Then hold Option, press the accent key, release, and press the letter.

Press	Then	Gives
Option+E	a e i o u	á é í ó ú
Option and the backtick key	a e i o u	à è ì ò ù
Option+N	a n o	ã ñ õ
Option+U	a e i o u	ä ë ï ö ü
Option+I	a e i o u	â ê î ô û

ABC Extended goes further and adds the Czech, French, German, Hungarian and Polish marks along with Mandarin tone marks. It is the same layout described in How to type accents on a Mac (Option key and press-and-hold), so anything you have learned on a Mac transfers directly. If you would rather not set any of this up, press the globe key to bring the onscreen keyboard back and touch and hold as usual.

Dictation will not solve this

Dictation inserts accents according to the language you dictate in, not the language of the keyboard. Dictating a French word while your dictation language is English gives you an English spelling attempt, not é. Switch dictation languages with the globe key first, or accept that you will be correcting by hand.

Related guides

Android works on the same principle but with a different set of variants and one important difference in how enabled languages change the popup; see How to type accents on Android (Gboard and Samsung). The desktop equivalents are in How to type accents on Windows (Alt codes and layouts), where Alt codes need a numeric keypad with Num Lock switched on, and How to type accents on a Mac (Option key and press-and-hold), with the code reference in Alt codes for accented letters: the complete verified list. Chromebooks have their own approach in How to type accents on a Chromebook. If you are pasting text between a phone and a system that rejects accented characters, Remove accents from text converts it in one step, and Common accent mistakes and the confusable characters covers the substitutions that are acceptable and the ones that are not. Every popup list and shortcut on this page was checked against Apple’s documentation and the verified research behind this site rather than copied from another guide.