German Umlauts & ß Alt Codes & Unicode Cheatsheet

German uses four characters that the plain 26-letter Latin alphabet cannot express: the umlauted vowels ä, ö and ü, and the sharp s, ß, called the Eszett or scharfes S. The umlaut is not decorative. It marks a genuine sound change and, very often, a grammatical one. Mutter means mother and Mütter means mothers; Apfel is an apple and Äpfel are apples. Drop the two dots and you have not written the word slightly wrong, you have written a different word. The same is true of the Eszett: Masse is mass or bulk, while Maße are measurements.

The Eszett has a history that still causes trouble. For most of its life it existed only as a lowercase letter, so writing in capitals meant substituting SS: STRASSE for Straße. In 2017 the Council for German Orthography formally adopted the capital ẞ (U+1E9E), which is why you will find it in the table above, but adoption is uneven. Many fonts still lack the glyph, and most German style guides continue to accept SS in all-caps settings. If you are setting a headline or a legal document, check which convention your house style expects before reaching for ẞ.

Switzerland and Liechtenstein are the exception worth knowing about. Swiss Standard German abolished the Eszett entirely: Swiss keyboards do not have the key, and Swiss publications write Strasse, Masse and grüssen with a double s throughout. The umlauts remain. So if you are localising for a Swiss audience, ß is not merely optional, it is wrong.

On Windows, hold Alt and type the code on the numeric keypad with Num Lock on: ä is Alt+0228, ö is Alt+0246, ü is Alt+0252 and ß is Alt+0223. On macOS the umlaut is a dead key, Option+U followed by the vowel, and ß is Option+S. On Linux the compose key gives you Compose then " then the vowel, and Compose s s for ß. On iOS and Android, hold the base vowel and slide to the umlauted form; ß lives under a long press on the s key. If you need more than a character or two, switching to a proper German QWERTZ layout is faster than any of these, and it also moves y and z to their German positions.

A practical warning about search and sorting. German has two competing conventions for alphabetising umlauts: dictionary order treats ä as if it were a, while phone-book order treats it as ae. Some systems do neither and sort ä after z, which is why a name like Müller can vanish from a list you are certain it belongs to. Web forms that strip diacritics before validation cause the same class of bug. When a German name or address will not match, try the transliterated spelling — ae, oe, ue and ss — before assuming the record is missing.