French Accents Alt Codes & Unicode Cheatsheet

French uses five diacritics, and each does a different job. The acute accent appears only on e (é) and marks the closed vowel of été. The grave accent on è opens that vowel, as in mère, but on à, ù and the a of là it does something else entirely: it distinguishes homographs. The circumflex on â, ê, î, ô and û is usually a fossil, marking an s that disappeared from Old French, which is why forêt sits beside English forest and hôpital beside hospital. The diaeresis on ë, ï and ü tells you two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately, as in Noël or naïve. The cedilla under ç softens c to an s sound before a, o and u: français, garçon, reçu.

The homograph cases are where a missing accent changes meaning rather than merely looking careless. A is the verb form he or she has; à is the preposition to or at. Ou means or; où means where. Sur means on; sûr means sure. Du is the partitive article; dû is the past participle of devoir. None of these are subtle in reading, and a French reader notices the omission immediately.

The 1990 spelling reform made the circumflex optional on i and u in most words, so both maitre and maître are now acceptable, as are cout and coût. It did not make it optional where the accent distinguishes meaning, so sûr and dû keep theirs. Adoption has been slow and inconsistent, and most publishers and schools still teach the traditional spellings, so the safe default in formal writing is to keep the circumflex.

On Windows, hold Alt with Num Lock on: é is Alt+0233, è is Alt+0232, ê is Alt+0234, à is Alt+0224, ç is Alt+0231 and ù is Alt+0249. On macOS the accents are dead keys: Option+E then the vowel for acute, Option+` then the vowel for grave, Option+I then the vowel for circumflex, Option+U then the vowel for diaeresis, and Option+C for ç. On Linux, Compose plus the accent character plus the letter does the same. On mobile, long-press the base vowel and pick from the popup. For sustained writing, a French AZERTY layout puts é, è, ç and à on unshifted keys in the number row.

One thing that trips people up: capitals. There is a persistent myth that French capitals do not take accents, which comes from the limitations of mechanical typewriters and early typesetting rather than from any rule. The Académie française is explicit that accents belong on capitals too, so it is État and not Etat, and À bientôt rather than A bientôt. Newspaper headlines still omit them frequently, but in careful writing the accented capitals in the table above are the correct forms.