Typing accented letters and symbols

Five mechanisms, in rough order of usefulness

Every method of producing a character that is not printed on your keycaps is one of these five. Knowing which one you are using explains most of the strange behaviour people run into — apostrophes that do not appear, a right Alt key that produces letters, a shortcut that works in one application and not another.

What a dead key actually does

A dead key is a key that produces nothing when you press it, and modifies the next character instead. On a French, Spanish, Portuguese or Czech layout the accent keys work this way: press the acute accent, nothing appears, press E, and é arrives complete.

The mechanism is old — it is named after the typewriter keys that struck the accent without advancing the carriage, so the next letter landed underneath it — and it is still the best available, because it composes. One accent key and twenty-six letters give you every combination the layout permits, without a separate shortcut for each.

What it does when the combination does not exist varies, and this is worth knowing before it confuses you. Press the acute accent and then the letter K, and most layouts emit both characters separately: a standalone accent followed by a K. A few emit nothing. Either way the rule is that a dead key is always waiting for the next keystroke, and pressing space is how you tell it you wanted the accent on its own.

The layout that catches the most people out is Windows' US International, which turns the apostrophe, quotation mark, backtick, tilde and caret into dead keys on an otherwise American board. It is an excellent layout if you type Spanish or French on US hardware. It is baffling if you enabled it by accident, because typing don't in ordinary English now produces dont with the apostrophe waiting, and the fix — press space after the apostrophe — is not something anyone guesses.

AltGr, and why it is not the same thing

AltGr is the key to the right of the space bar on most keyboards sold outside the United States, and despite sitting where a second Alt key would, it is a different key doing a different job. It selects a third character from the key you press with it: the keycap shows a lower case letter, a capital with Shift, and something else again with AltGr.

This is how layouts fit an alphabet larger than the board onto it. A Polish keyboard is a US keyboard with AltGr added: AltGr and A gives ą, AltGr and C gives ć, AltGr and L gives ł. The letters stay where the corresponding Latin letters are, which is the entire design — a Polish typist who knows QWERTY already knows where every Polish letter is.

Unlike a dead key, AltGr does not compose. It is a direct third level, so each combination has to be provided by the layout, and if the layout does not define one nothing happens at all. That is the trade: dead keys are general and need two presses, AltGr is specific and needs one.

On a US keyboard with no physical AltGr, Windows treats Ctrl with the left Alt as equivalent. This is also the explanation for an occasional mystery: a Ctrl-and-Alt shortcut in an application quietly inserting a letter instead of doing what it was supposed to.

The method to avoid, and why people reach for it

Typing the Unicode code point — Alt and a number on the numeric keypad on Windows, Ctrl-Shift-U and a hex number on Linux, a special Unicode Hex Input layout on macOS — works, and it is almost always the wrong tool.

It requires a memorised number for every character, it is several keystrokes for one letter, it needs a numeric keypad on the platform where most people meet it, and it fails inside some applications. People reach for it because it is the first answer a search returns, and because it does not require changing any settings. Neither of those is a good reason to type a language one code point at a time.

The two other common workarounds deserve the same warning. Copying characters from a web page is fine once and unusable as a habit. Relying on autocorrect to put the accent back is worse than it looks: it is guessing, it is wrong on exactly the words where the accent carries meaning, and it teaches your hands nothing. Every language with diacritics has pairs that differ only by the mark, and the whole point of the mark is that they are different words.

The honest answer: change the layout

If you need these characters more than occasionally, the right move is not a shortcut. It is to install the keyboard layout for the language and learn it, which takes a fortnight of short sessions and then never costs anything again.

The objection is always that the characters are not printed on the keys, and it is worth meeting directly: that is true, and it stops mattering the moment you stop looking down. A touch typist does not read the keycaps. The letters on your keyboard are a crutch for the two weeks in which you are learning, and stickers or a printed keycap set will extend those two weeks rather than shorten them, because a visible answer removes the need to recall one.

It is a setting rather than a purchase on every operating system — a list of layouts, an Add button, and usually a key combination to switch between them. The language pages on this site name the standard layout for each of the languages they teach, and the keyboard guide shows the physical key and the character it produces at the same time, which is the part a printed keycap cannot do for a script you are still learning.

Which languages need which character

Everything above is about how a character is produced, and that depends on the layout in front of you. This is the other question: which of these characters you will actually be asked for. It is counted from the practice words on this site rather than asserted — which makes it a floor rather than an alphabet, because sixty words sample a language without exhausting it. German writes ä, ö and ß; the German bank here happens to contain only ü.

Across the forty-seven Latin-alphabet languages here, the practice words need 92 characters beyond a-z between them. Twelve banks stay inside a-z entirely — English, Indonesian, Malay, Swahili and Zulu among them — which is why a plain US keyboard serves those exercises completely. At the other end Vietnamese needs 33, more than three times the next widest, and 23 of the 92 are needed by Vietnamese and nothing else.

The table below is the shared middle: the characters three or more languages need. Learn to produce those comfortably and you have covered most of what most European languages will ask of you.