All the German special characters on one page — the umlauts ä, ö, ü and the eszett ß in both cases, plus genuine German quotation marks. Click any character to copy it instantly, no German keyboard required.
The four special letters of German — the three umlauts plus the eszett (sharp s).
The capital eszett ẞ (U+1E9E) was officially adopted into German orthography in 2017 — before that, ß became SS in all-caps text.
German quotes open low and close high: „Beispiel“. Angle quotes are used in the reversed direction compared to French: »Beispiel«.
Click any character to copy it, or use the section buttons to copy groups.
The German alphabet uses the standard 26 Latin letters plus four special characters: the three umlauts ä, ö, ü and the eszett ß, also called the sharp s. The umlauts are not decorative — they change both pronunciation and meaning: schon means "already" while schön means "beautiful", and Mutter (mother) becomes Mütter (mothers) in the plural. All four lowercase characters sit in Unicode's Latin-1 Supplement block (U+00C0–U+00FF), which means they render correctly on effectively every device, browser, form field, and platform made in the last two decades — from Instagram bios to government PDFs.
The rule for ß versus ss trips up even advanced learners. Since the 1996 spelling reform, ß follows long vowels and diphthongs — Straße (street), heißen (to be called), Fuß (foot) — while ss follows short vowels: dass, Fluss, Schloss. Swiss and Liechtenstein German dropped ß entirely and write ss everywhere, so Strasse is correct in Zürich but not in Berlin. If you are filling out an official form, writing to a German company, or finishing homework, copying the genuine character from this page is safer than guessing which spelling applies.
When German characters are unavailable, every special letter has an official ASCII fallback: ä becomes ae, ö becomes oe, ü becomes ue, and ß becomes ss — which is why Müller appears as Mueller in email addresses and airline bookings. The capital eszett ẞ (U+1E9E) is the newest German letter: the Council for German Orthography officially adopted it in 2017 for all-caps writing, so STRASSE and STRAẞE are now both correct. Because ẞ sits outside Latin-1 in the Latin Extended Additional block, a few very old fonts still miss it, but every current operating system displays it fine.
Yes. All four letters are standard Unicode from the Latin-1 Supplement block, which every modern platform supports — Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Discord, X, and email clients all display them correctly in bios, captions, messages, and usernames. The only common failure point is systems restricted to plain ASCII, such as some email addresses, where the official fallbacks ae, oe, ue, ss apply.
Since the 1996 reform, ß follows long vowels and diphthongs (Straße, heißen, groß) while ss follows short vowels (dass, Fluss, muss). A quick test: if the vowel before the sound is stretched out, use ß. Note that Switzerland and Liechtenstein abolished ß completely — Swiss German writes ss in every position, so both Strasse and Straße exist depending on the country.
Yes — ẞ (U+1E9E) became official in 2017, when the Council for German Orthography added it to the standard. Before that, ß was replaced by SS in all-caps text, which caused ambiguity in names on passports: WEISS could be Weiss or Weiß. Today both STRASSE and STRAẞE are correct, and the capital form is preferred where the distinction matters.
As a fallback, yes — the digraph spellings are officially recognized and used in email addresses, flight bookings, and crossword puzzles. But in normal German writing they look wrong and can be genuinely ambiguous, because some words legitimately contain ae or oe. For anything a German speaker will read — a letter, a form, homework — use the real umlauts from this page.
Use the free online German QWERTZ keyboard linked below — it puts ä, ö, ü, and ß in their native positions in your browser with nothing to install. If you prefer keyboard shortcuts on Windows, the German alt codes page lists the numeric codes, such as Alt+0228 for ä and Alt+0223 for ß.