Portuguese Accents Alt Codes & Unicode Cheatsheet

Portuguese uses four diacritics that do distinct jobs. The tilde on ã and õ marks nasal vowels, a defining feature of the language: irmã, pão, limões, coração. The acute on á, é, í, ó and ú marks a stressed open vowel. The circumflex on â, ê and ô marks a stressed closed vowel — so avô is grandfather and avó is grandmother, differing only in that one mark. The cedilla under ç gives an s sound before a, o and u, as in começar and açúcar.

The nasal vowels deserve attention because they have no English equivalent and no acceptable substitute. Writing pao instead of pão is not a near miss; the words are pronounced differently and pao is not a word. The same holds for mae versus mãe. If your system cannot render ã and õ, the text is broken rather than merely informal.

The 1990 Orthographic Agreement, which took effect across the Portuguese-speaking world during the 2010s, changed several things that older references still get wrong. It removed the diaeresis from Brazilian Portuguese, so what was once lingüiça and freqüente is now linguiça and frequente. It dropped the acute from paroxytone diphthongs, so idéia became ideia and heróico became heroico. And it removed the circumflex from forms like vôo and lêem, now voo and leem. If you learned Portuguese before about 2012 or are working from an older text, these are the spellings to check.

European and Brazilian Portuguese still differ in accent placement on a set of common words, and neither is wrong. Brazilian writing uses ô where European writing uses ó in words like antônio and António, económico and econômico. Decide which variety you are writing for and stay consistent rather than mixing the two.

On Windows, hold Alt with Num Lock on: ã is Alt+0227, õ Alt+0245, ç Alt+0231, á Alt+0225, â Alt+0226, é Alt+0233, ê Alt+0234, ó Alt+0243 and ô Alt+0244. On macOS, Option+N then the vowel gives the tilde, Option+E then the vowel the acute, Option+I then the vowel the circumflex, and Option+C gives ç. On Linux, Compose then ~ then the vowel, and Compose then , then c. On mobile, long-press the base letter. A Portuguese layout gives ç its own key and makes the tilde a convenient dead key, which is worth the switch for anything substantial.