How to Type Special Characters on a Windows PC

The situation is as follows: you are typing a work report and suddenly you need to write the phrase “Jones nee Berkowitz”. Or you are adding a Spanish sentence and need to use the word “años”. How do you add the special characters to the letters?

Special characters (also known as diacritical marks) may be more common in certain languages, but there are many circumstances in which English speakers may need to use them. But because they are so rare in English, native English speakers may not have learned how to add these tags to documents, emails, or other writing. It’s not difficult to add them to your Windows document, although it’s not as easy an operation as on a Mac, where all you have to do is hold down the appropriate key. (Actually, once upon a time, you’d have to look up the character codes for symbols…)

The easiest way to add diacritical marks to a document is to enable the Windows on-screen keyboard. (Thanks to Ed Bott from ZDNet for first leading me to this method.) The virtual keyboard appears automatically if you are using a Windows tablet or if you are using a PC in tablet mode. If you don’t have a touchscreen, you can use the keyboard icon that appears in the taskbar, on the right side next to the date. Don’t you see that? This is how you achieve it:

• Right-click on the taskbar.
• click in Taskbar Settingsthat will take you to Personalization > Taskbar page. Meet Show touch keyboard iconwhere can you choose Never ever, or When there is no keyboard connected.

Now when you want to use a special character:

• Click on the touch keyboard icon
• The virtual keyboard will appear. Press and hold (with the mouse button or, if you have a touchscreen, with your finger) the letter you want to use
• Now you will see several extra keys showing how you can type that letter with different symbols. Select what you want and it will appear in your document.
• If you want to insert an emoji or GIF, click the emoji key in the top left corner of the “keyboard”, next to the task gear.

Another keyboard that you can access and allow you to easily add special characters to your text is the Windows emoji keyboard. Yes, it is mainly for adding emoji to your text, but it also has other uses. And it’s simple to use:

• Hold down the Windows key (the one with the Windows symbol) and press the period key.
• The emoji keyboard will appear, showing a variety of emojis. Click the symbols tab at the top (second from the right).

• Use the menu on the top row to select the type of symbol you are looking for (in this case, Latin symbols). Then scroll down until you find the character you want.

If you want to try an older method of adding special characters to Windows, you can use Character Map, which is a less polished and more complicated version of the on-screen keyboard, but offers a similar service.

• Open a search box by pressing Win-Q keys and search for “character map”.
• You will get a pop-up map showing various special characters for a specific font. You can change the font by clicking the font dropdown at the top.

• Click the letter(s) or special characters you want to use in your document, and then click the Select button. They will appear in Characters to copy field.
• After selecting all the characters you want, click the button copy of button and paste the character(s) into your document

If you speak English, are multilingual and use a lot of special characters, try US International Keyboard, which maps your keyboard to let you add special characters more easily. (Thanks to “shiroledat” for the tip.)

First, you need to add the US international keyboard to Windows:

• Go to Settings > Time & language > Language & region
• To search for Preferred languages and (assuming you speak English in the US) click the three dots to the right of United States English). Then click Language options.
• Look for the Keyboards section, which (if you’ve never been there before) will probably just contain a single keyboard icon labeled “US/QWERTY”. This is the keymap you are using now. click on the Add a keyboard button.
• In the pop-up menu that appears, scroll to “United States-International / QWERTY” and click on it

Now you have the option to use the standard US keyboard or the US international keyboard. You can see which one is active in the bottom right corner of the taskbar, next to the date. It will read “ENG/US” or “ENG/INTL”. You can click it to switch from one to another or just press Windows key + spacebar.

The US International Keyboard offers two ways to add a special character:

• Use the right Alt key in combination with the appropriate letter to get one of the most common combinations (for example, Alt+e will result in: é).
• Press the symbol you want to use and then the letter you want to use it with (for example, if you press the ~ symbol first and then the “n” key, you will get: ñ).

Washington State University published a useful chart showing all the symbols you can get using the US international keyboard.

If you look in the lower left corner of the character map after choosing a letter or special character, you will see a “U” and a four-digit number. This number represents the Unicode Value of the symbol, and is the established standard for adding characters.

If you use some special characters consistently, it may be faster to simply add the character you want using the keyboard. There are several ways to do this; Here are two of the easiest (each with its limitations):

• Press the Alt key and type the four-digit Unicode value. For this to work, you need to have a separate number pad on your keyboard and the NumLock key must be enabled.
• If you are working with Microsoft Word, WordPad, Outlook, or another Microsoft application, you can type the Unicode value and type Alt-X.
• You can also press the Control key plus a symbol and then the letter you want to accentuate. For example, Ctrl+’ and “e” will result in “é” — assuming you are in a Microsoft application.

Update May 13, 2024, 12:47 PM ET: This article was originally published on March 26, 2021 and has been updated for Windows 11 and to add additional tips.