Russian Characters - Alt Codes & Unicode

Three Cyrillic characters cause disproportionate trouble for people typing Russian, and all three are in the table above. Ё is a full letter of the Russian alphabet, seventh in order, but it is optional in print — and that optionality is the source of endless confusion. The two signs, ь and ъ, are letters that represent no sound at all; they modify the consonant before them.

The soft sign ь palatalises the preceding consonant, and it changes meaning routinely. Мат and мать are different words. Угол is a corner and уголь is coal. Брат is brother and брать is to take. It also marks grammatical categories: most feminine nouns ending in a consonant take ь, and the infinitive of most verbs ends in -ть. Omitting it is not a typo that readers glide past; it produces a different word or a broken form.

The hard sign ъ is far rarer and does the opposite job, blocking palatalisation at a prefix boundary — объект, съесть, подъезд. Before the 1918 orthographic reform it appeared at the end of every word ending in a consonant, which is why pre-revolutionary Russian text looks cluttered with them to a modern eye, and why the reform cut printed page counts noticeably.

Ё is the genuinely contentious one. Russian convention permits writing е in place of ё in ordinary text, and most books, newspapers and websites do exactly that, leaving readers to infer the pronunciation. It is mandatory only in dictionaries, textbooks for learners, and where ambiguity would mislead — все means everyone while всё means everything, and узнаем differs from узнаём. The practical consequence for anyone handling Russian data is that ё and е must be treated as equivalent when searching or matching, because the same name will be spelled both ways. Russian surnames are the classic case: Хрущёв is routinely written Хрущев, and both are considered acceptable.

On Windows, Alt codes for Cyrillic depend on the active codepage and are unreliable; the standard ЙЦУКЕН layout is the real answer, and it places ё on the key left of the number 1, with ь and ъ on the right-hand side of the home and top rows. If you must use codes, ё is Alt+0184 and Ё is Alt+0168 in the Cyrillic codepage. On macOS, select the Russian input source; note that the Russian and Russian PC layouts differ in where they put ё, which catches people switching between machines. On Linux, the standard Russian layout matches Windows. On mobile Russian keyboards, ё is usually hidden behind a long press on е, which is part of why it gets omitted so often in casual typing.