Capital Letters With Accent Marks: Alt Codes, Shortcuts and Rules

To type a capital letter with an accent, use the capital's own code or add Shift to the letter. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0201 on the number pad for É. On a Mac, press Option + E, then Shift + E.

Click any capital in the grid above to copy it. Below you will find the keys for every common accented capital, the mistakes that trip people up, and the rules on whether capitals should keep their accents at all.

Capital accent letters: shortcut table

Alt codes need the number pad with Num Lock on. The full set, lowercase included, is on our Alt codes page.

Windows: capitals have their own Alt codes

Every Alt code produces one fixed character. Caps Lock and Shift do not change it, so Alt 0233 always gives lowercase é, even with Caps Lock on.

To get the capital, use its own code from the table. A handy pattern: for the common Latin capitals, the four-digit code is 32 lower than the lowercase one. é is 0233, so É is 0201. Ÿ (0159) and Œ (0140) are exceptions.

The short codes without a leading zero (Alt 144 for É, Alt 165 for Ñ) come from an older character set and only exist for a few capitals. Stick with the 0xxx codes and you will not get stuck.

On a laptop without a number pad, press Win + . (period), open the Symbols tab and pick the capital from the Latin list. More options in our guide to typing accents on Windows.

US International keyboard

With the US International layout, press the accent key, then Shift with the letter: ' then Shift + E gives É, and ~ then Shift + N gives Ñ.

Mac: Shift goes on the letter, not the Option key

This is the most common mistake. Press Option + E as normal, release, then press Shift + E. If you hold Shift with the Option key instead, you get a different symbol or nothing at all.

The only exceptions are letters with a single Option shortcut, such as Ç, which is Option + Shift + C.

Press and hold also works for capitals. Turn on Caps Lock, then hold down the letter key to see the accented capitals. See our Mac accents guide for the rest.

Microsoft Word: same rule, Shift on the letter

In Word for Windows, press the accent combination first, release, then press Shift with the letter. Ctrl + ' then Shift + E gives É.

You can also type the hex code and press Alt + X: 00C9 then Alt + X gives É.

If you have already typed a word in lowercase with accents, select it and press Shift + F3 to cycle through lowercase, Title Case and UPPERCASE. The accents stay in place.

iPhone and Android

Tap Shift (or double-tap it for caps lock), then press and hold the letter. The pop-up shows the accented capitals. Slide to the one you need.

Should capital letters keep their accents?

Yes, in both Spanish and French, according to the institutions that set the rules for each language.

Spanish

The Real Academia Española (RAE) is clear: capital letters carry an accent whenever the normal rules call for one. Write Álvaro, ÉL and MÉXICO, not Alvaro, EL and MEXICO.

The accent often changes the meaning. "EL" is "the" and "ÉL" is "he". Our Spanish accent rules explain when the accent is needed in the first place.

French

The Académie française recommends full accents on capitals, including Ç. Without them, a headline like "UN POLICIER TUE" could mean "a police officer kills" (tue) or "a police officer killed" (tué).

The habit of dropping accents on French capitals came from typewriters and early keyboards that could not type them easily. It was never a spelling rule. See French accent marks explained for how each mark works.

Other languages

German keeps umlauts on capitals: Ä, Ö and Ü are always written. Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and the Slavic languages also keep their marks in uppercase.

Turning text to uppercase without losing accents

Most modern tools keep accents when they change case:

• Word: Shift + F3, or the Change Case button on the Home tab.
• Google Docs: Format, then Text, then Capitalization, then UPPERCASE.
• CSS: text-transform: uppercase keeps accents if the page uses UTF-8.
• Excel and Google Sheets: the UPPER function keeps accents.

If accents disappear or turn into odd symbols after a case change, the text has likely been saved in an old encoding. Retype or paste the letters from the grid above.