The five Romanian special letters in both cases, ready to copy with one click — using the correct comma-below forms ș and ț, not the cedilla lookalikes. The legacy cedilla forms are included separately, clearly marked, for when you need to match older text.
These are the standard Romanian diacritics. Note that ș and ț use a comma below the letter — the officially correct forms (U+0219, U+021B).
Warning: these cedilla forms (U+015F, U+0163) are typographically WRONG for Romanian — the language uses a comma below, not a cedilla. They spread through older fonts and Windows systems that lacked the comma forms, and still appear in older texts and databases. Use the comma-below letters above for correct Romanian; the cedilla ş belongs to Turkish.
Click any character to copy it, or use the section buttons to copy groups.
Romanian extends the 26-letter Latin alphabet with five special letters, for 31 in total: ă (a with breve, the schwa sound in apă), â and î (both spelling the same close central vowel), and the hissing pair ș and ț, as in București and ață. The split between â and î follows a rule reinstated by the Romanian Academy in 1993: î appears at the start and end of words (început, a coborî) and â everywhere inside them (România, mână) — same sound, position decides the spelling. Compound words keep the î of their root, which is why reîncepe is written with î mid-word.
The ș and ț characters carry a famous Unicode trap. Correct Romanian uses a comma below the letter — Ș/ș (U+0218/U+0219) and Ț/ț (U+021A/U+021B) — but for years computers substituted the visually similar cedilla forms ş/ţ (U+015F/U+0163), because early fonts and Windows code pages simply did not include the comma-below letters. Unicode added the correct forms in version 3.0 at Romania's request, and Windows shipped full support starting with Vista in 2007. The cedilla ş remains a perfectly valid letter — for Turkish. In Romanian it is a typographic error that nonetheless survives in older documents, databases, and web pages.
That legacy split still bites today: a name stored with cedilla forms will not match the same name typed with comma forms, so searches, logins, and database lookups can silently fail even though both versions look nearly identical on screen. When you copy from this page you always get the correct comma-below codepoints — the right choice for spelling names like Ștefan, Țepeș, or Ionuț in documents, forms, homework, and bios. Every modern platform renders them correctly; only genuinely outdated fonts still show a box or fall back to the cedilla shape.
Always the comma-below forms: ș (U+0219) and ț (U+021B). The Romanian Academy and the Unicode standard are unambiguous — Romanian uses a comma, not a cedilla. The cedilla forms ş and ţ spread only because 1990s fonts lacked the correct letters. The one legitimate use of ş is Turkish, where the cedilla is the proper shape.
Very old fonts predate the comma-below letters, so they either show a placeholder box or silently render the cedilla shape instead. Every font shipped with Windows since Vista, plus all current macOS, Android, and iOS systems, displays them correctly. If a website shows boxes, the page is using an outdated custom font — the characters you copied are still correct underneath.
Yes. All five letters are standard precomposed Unicode — ă and â from Latin Extended-A and Latin-1 Supplement, ș and ț from Latin Extended-B — and they render correctly in bios, posts, comments, and messages on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Discord, X, and WhatsApp. Only ASCII-restricted fields, like some email addresses and account handles, will reject them.
Nothing in sound — both spell the same close central vowel. Position dictates the letter: î starts and ends words (întreb, a hotărî) while â appears word-internally (câine, România). This rule was reinstated in 1993; between 1953 and 1993 the spelling was î almost everywhere, which is why older books write Romînia. Compounds keep the root's î, as in reîntoarce.
Use the free online Romanian keyboard linked below — it gives you the standard Romanian layout in your browser with ă, â, î, ș, and ț in their native positions, nothing to install, and correct comma-below output guaranteed. The Romanian characters page also lists alt codes and shortcuts for typing the letters directly in Windows and Word.