Every accented French letter in both cases, plus the ligatures œ and æ and the guillemets « » used for French quotations. Click any character to copy it instantly — including the capitals with accents that French keyboards make so hard to type.
French uses five diacritics: the acute (é only), the grave (à è ù), the circumflex (â ê î ô û), the diaeresis (ë ï ü ÿ), and the cedilla (ç).
The Académie française is clear: accents keep their full value on capitals — École, Être, À bientôt. These ready-made capitals save you the awkward keyboard gymnastics.
The œ ligature is mandatory in words like cœur and sœur — writing oe is a spelling error. Guillemets « » are the standard French quotation marks.
Click any character to copy it, or use the section buttons to copy groups.
French dresses the Latin alphabet in five diacritics, and each one earns its keep. The acute appears only on é (été, café); the grave lives on à, è, and ù — where ù exists solely for the word où. The circumflex on â, ê, î, ô, û often marks an s that vanished centuries ago, which is why forêt matches English forest and hôpital matches hospital. The diaeresis on ë, ï, ü, ÿ splits vowels into separate syllables, as in Noël and naïve, and the cedilla under ç softens c to an s sound before a, o, u: français, garçon, reçu.
The œ ligature is a real letter combination, not a typographic flourish: cœur, sœur, œuvre, and œil must be written with the joined form, and school dictations mark oe as an error. Its rarer cousin æ survives in Latin borrowings like ex æquo and curriculum vitæ. Most French characters sit in Unicode's Latin-1 Supplement block, but Œ, œ, and Ÿ were famously left out of it and live in Latin Extended-A instead — one reason older systems mangled them. The Ÿ itself is genuinely rare, appearing in proper names like L'Haÿ-les-Roses, but every character here is precomposed and pastes cleanly on modern platforms.
Do capitals take accents? Typists long dropped them because typewriters and the AZERTY layout made É and À awkward, but the Académie française is unequivocal: the accent has full orthographic value, on capitals as everywhere else. The classic cautionary example is a grocery sign — BISCUITS SALES means dirty biscuits, while BISCUITS SALÉS means salted ones. That is exactly why this page includes the full uppercase set: forms, headlines, and legal documents in ALL CAPS still need É, È, Ç, and À, and copying them is far easier than hunting for keyboard codes.
Yes. The Académie française states that accents have full orthographic value on capitals: École, Épée, À bientôt. The habit of dropping them came from typewriters and keyboard layouts that could not produce É easily, not from grammar. Omitting them can flip meaning — SALE (dirty) versus SALÉ (salted) — so copy the accented capitals from this page whenever your keyboard resists.
Not in correct French — cœur, sœur, œuvre, and œil require the joined œ, and dictionaries treat oe as a misspelling. The ligature is a single Unicode character (U+0153) that older systems sometimes broke because it is missing from the Latin-1 block, but every modern platform handles it fine. Copy it from the ligatures section above rather than typing two letters.
Yes. Every character on this page is standard precomposed Unicode, rendered correctly by Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord, X, and modern email clients — in bios, captions, comments, and display names. Even the trickier œ and Ÿ work everywhere current. Only strictly ASCII fields, such as some email addresses and account handles, will reject accented letters.
They are guillemets, the standard French quotation marks: « Bonjour », dit-elle. They point outward around the quote — the opposite roles from German usage — and French typography traditionally sets a thin non-breaking space just inside each mark. English-style curly quotes appear in French only for quotes nested inside guillemets, so copy « » for any proper French quotation.
Use the free online French AZERTY keyboard linked below — it reproduces the real French layout in your browser, with é, è, ç, and à on dedicated keys and dead-key combinations for the circumflex and diaeresis, nothing to install. For Windows shortcuts, the French alt codes page lists the numeric code for every accented character, including the capitals.