Italian Accents Alt Codes & Unicode Cheatsheet

Italian uses far fewer diacritics than French or Portuguese, and they appear almost exclusively on the final vowel of a word. The grave accent covers à, ì, ò and ù, and it marks a word stressed on its last syllable: città, così, però, più. Since Italian normally stresses the second-to-last syllable, the accent is the reader's signal that this word breaks the pattern. Without it, perché would be read with the wrong emphasis and caffè would look like an incomplete word.

The one genuine complication is e. Italian distinguishes è with a grave from é with an acute, and the difference is a real vowel contrast: è is open, é is closed. È means is, the third-person form of essere, while e means and — a distinction you cannot skip, because e un problema and è un problema say different things. The acute é appears in a smaller, largely closed set of words: perché, poiché, affinché, benché, né, sé, and the past historic forms like poté. Most other final-stressed e words take the grave.

Because the accents sit on final vowels, Italian rarely needs accented capitals in running text. They do appear at the start of sentences beginning with È, and this is where a widespread shortcut causes trouble: writing E' with an apostrophe instead of È. It is a typewriter-era workaround, it is not correct typography, and it breaks searching and sorting. The accented capitals in the table above are the right forms.

On Windows, hold Alt with Num Lock on: à is Alt+0224, è Alt+0232, é Alt+0233, ì Alt+0236, ò Alt+0242 and ù Alt+0249. For capitals, È is Alt+0200 and É is Alt+0201. On macOS, Option+` followed by the vowel produces the grave and Option+E followed by the vowel produces the acute; holding a vowel key also opens the accent picker. On Linux, Compose then ` then the vowel. On mobile, long-press the vowel. An Italian layout is the most comfortable option for extended writing, since it places à, è, ì, ò and ù directly on unshifted keys to the right of the letters.

Two smaller points worth knowing. Italian does not use the circumflex in modern spelling except in the rare literary plural like principî, so if you find yourself reaching for î you are probably writing an older or specialised form. And the apostrophe in elisions such as l'amico or dell'acqua is a true apostrophe, not an accent and not a straight quote mark; using the typographic apostrophe keeps text searchable and correctly hyphenated.