Spanish Accents Alt Codes & Unicode Cheatsheet

Spanish diacritics are unusually systematic. The acute accent does one main job — it marks which syllable carries the stress when the word departs from the default pattern. Words ending in a vowel, n or s are stressed on the second-to-last syllable by default; everything else is stressed on the last. When a word breaks that rule, it takes a written accent: teléfono, canción, árbol. Learn the rule and the accents stop being arbitrary marks to memorise and become predictable.

The second job of the acute accent is to separate identical-looking words, and here it is not optional. Tú means you but tu means your. Él is he, el is the. Sí is yes, si is if. Más is more, mas is an old word for but. Sé is I know, se is the reflexive pronoun. In each pair the accented form is typically the stressed, standalone word. Note that the Real Academia Española dropped the accent from solo and from the demonstratives este, ese and aquel in 2010, so the older spellings sólo and éste now look dated rather than correct.

Ñ is not an accented n. It is a separate letter of the Spanish alphabet with its own dictionary position between n and o, and its own history: it began as a scribal shorthand for a doubled nn, with the tilde standing in for the second letter. Treating it as decoration produces real errors, because año is year and ano is anus, and the difference matters more than any accent in this table.

The inverted marks ¡ and ¿ open exclamations and questions, and Spanish uses them because its word order often gives no early warning that a sentence is a question. ¿Vienes mañana? tells the reader at the first character what is coming. They are required in standard written Spanish, including in the middle of a sentence: Si puedes, ¿me llamas? Dropping them is common in casual messaging but is an error in edited prose.

On Windows, hold Alt with Num Lock on: á is Alt+0225, é Alt+0233, í Alt+0237, ó Alt+0243, ú Alt+0250, ñ Alt+0241, ¿ Alt+0191 and ¡ Alt+0161. On macOS, Option+E then the vowel gives the acute, Option+N then n gives ñ, and Shift+Option+? and Option+1 give the inverted marks. On Linux, Compose then apostrophe then the vowel, and Compose then ~ then n. On mobile, long-press the vowel, the n, or the question and exclamation keys. A Spanish layout puts ñ on its own key beside l, which is worth switching to for anything longer than a sentence.