Accent Marks & Diacritics Table
| Letter | Unicode name | Code point | Mark | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| á | Latin small letter a with acute | U+00E1 | Acute | Spanish, Portuguese, Icelandic |
| à | Latin small letter a with grave | U+00E0 | Grave | French, Italian |
| â | Latin small letter a with circumflex | U+00E2 | Circumflex | French, Portuguese |
| ä | Latin small letter a with diaeresis | U+00E4 | Umlaut / diaeresis | German, Finnish, Swedish |
| ã | Latin small letter a with tilde | U+00E3 | Tilde | Portuguese |
| å | Latin small letter a with ring above | U+00E5 | Ring | Swedish, Danish, Norwegian |
| ç | Latin small letter c with cedilla | U+00E7 | Cedilla | French, Portuguese, Turkish |
| é | Latin small letter e with acute | U+00E9 | Acute | French, Spanish, Czech |
| è | Latin small letter e with grave | U+00E8 | Grave | French, Italian |
| ê | Latin small letter e with circumflex | U+00EA | Circumflex | French, Portuguese |
| ë | Latin small letter e with diaeresis | U+00EB | Diaeresis | French (naïve family), Albanian |
| ñ | Latin small letter n with tilde | U+00F1 | Tilde | Spanish, Galician, Basque |
| ó | Latin small letter o with acute | U+00F3 | Acute | Polish, Spanish, Portuguese |
| ö | Latin small letter o with diaeresis | U+00F6 | Umlaut / diaeresis | German, Swedish, Turkish |
| ú | Latin small letter u with acute | U+00FA | Acute | Spanish, Czech, Hungarian |
| ü | Latin small letter u with diaeresis | U+00FC | Umlaut / diaeresis | German, Spanish (güe bridge), Estonian |
An accent mark is a diacritic - a small sign added to a letter to change how it sounds or what it means - and the marks on this table are the working set behind French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian and half the alphabets of Europe. The accents themselves are only seven shapes doing different jobs: the acute (é) rises, the grave (è) falls, the circumflex (ê) floats above, the tilde (ñ) waves, the umlaut/diaeresis (ü) doubles, the cedilla (ç) hooks below, and the ring (å) circles - every accented letter you will meet is one of these plus a base letter.
The names matter because keyboards, fonts and code all refer to the marks by name: the acute accent in resumé, the grave in voilà, the circumflex in fête, the tilde in jalapeño, the umlaut in Über, the cedilla in façade - borrow-words English keeps unaccented in casual writing but which printers, teachers and immigration forms still expect to be marked correctly. Unicode gives every combination a name and a code point, and this table carries both, because the name is what you type into a search box when the character itself refuses to paste.
How to use
- Read the code points in the U+XXXX form: the table lists each character's Unicode code point (é is U+00E9, ñ is U+00F1), which is the universal address of the character across every font, platform and programming language. Searching by code point sidesteps the paste-mangles-encoding problem entirely.
- Type them without a foreign keyboard: on Windows, hold Alt and type the four-digit code (Alt+0233 gives é); on Mac, hold the base letter until the accent menu pops (hold e, then press e again); on phones, long-press the letter. The table's names also feed character pickers and LaTeX (\'e, \`e, \^e) - one row, every input method.
- Match the mark to the language before guessing the sound: the same acute that makes Spanish é an eh sound makes French é a closed ay; the umlaut that turns German u into ü has no English equivalent at all. The language column is the pronunciation key - an accent borrowed into English (café, naïve) keeps its foreign value, which is why anglophone readers mispronounce precisely the words they see most often.
Frequently asked questions
What are the seven main accent marks called?
The acute (é, rising), the grave (è, falling), the circumflex (ê, the little roof), the tilde (ñ, the wave), the diaeresis or umlaut (ü, the double dot), the cedilla (ç, the tail below), and the ring above (å). Each has Unicode names for every letter it attaches to - e-acute, e-grave, n-tilde - which is what the table's name column records, because searching by mark-name finds the character when the character itself will not type.
How do I type é on a Windows keyboard?
Hold Alt and type 0233 on the numeric keypad - the four-digit code is é's Windows-1252 position. Every accented letter in the table has one (Alt+0241 for ñ, Alt+0252 for ü), or use the touch keyboard's long-press, or switch layouts with Win+Space. Mac users hold the base letter for the accent menu instead; phone users long-press. The code-point column doubles as the last resort: character map, then search U+00E9.
What is the difference between ü and ue in German?
The umlaut ü is a distinct letter with its own place in the alphabet and its own sound - a pursed-lip oo that English lacks. When a keyboard or an old system cannot produce ü, German convention substitutes ue (Müller becomes Mueller), which is why names and addresses flip between the two forms. The substitution is a workaround, not an equivalent: newspapers, passports and crosswords keep the umlaut, and sorting treats ü as its own letter after u.
Why does Spanish use ñ but French does not?
History, not logic: the tilde in ñ is a shorthand a medieval scribe drew over a doubled n (nn became ñ), and Spanish kept the abbreviation as a letter of its own - año (year) versus ano (anus) is the famous demonstration that the mark carries meaning. French instead uses letter combinations (gn in montagne) for the same sound. The table's language column shows which scripts treat each mark as a letter versus a decoration.
Why do some accented characters look wrong when I copy-paste them?
Unicode stores accented letters two ways: precomposed (é as one code point, U+00E9) or decomposed (e plus a combining acute accent, U+0065 U+0301). They can look identical and behave differently - search, sorting and length checks treat them as unequal, and broken encodings turn them into mojibake like é. Normalizing text (NFC form) folds the decomposed version into the precomposed one, and the table's code points are the precomposed forms.
Do English words need accent marks?
Borrowed words keep them optionally: café, fiancée, naïve, résumé and jalapeño carry accents in careful print and lose them in casual text, and both spellings are accepted - though resumé versus resume versus résumé shows how the accents disambiguate. English never marks native words, which is why the table matters most when you write the borrowed ones properly, quote a foreign phrase, or answer a form that validates names against the accented spelling.