If you want to spell café correctly, how do you get that accent over the e? Or get that tilde over the n when you write niño in Spanish? There are a few ways to do it.

Diacritical Marks Phonetics

First, holding down the Option key (on the bottom row of your keyboard) gives you common diacritical marks: e=´, i=ˆ, u=¨, n=˜, ~=`. To accent a letter, hold down the Option key, type the character representing that accent mark, then type the letter you want underneath it. For example, Option-i then e makes ê.

If you go to System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources and put a checkmark in front of “Keyboard & Character Viewer,” it puts up a little box at the top right of your screen. Click on that new icon in the upper right corner of your screen, and choose “Show Keyboard Viewer,” and a little keyboard will appear.

Hold down the Option key, and you can see all the special characters you get when using that key as a modifier. Try holding down the Shift key, and Shift-Option as well. You’ll see all kinds of characters you can type. The ones highlighted in orange are the ones that follow the tip above.

Cached

You have another option as well. In that same System Preferences window, scroll down and put a checkmark in front of US International – PC. Click the keyboard icon in the upper right corner of your screen again, and make sure it’s set to this new keyboard configuration. Now, just like in Windows, you can use these keyboard combos:

List Of Diacritical Marks

For á, é, í, ó, ú: press ‘ and directly after that, the vowel.
For à, è, ì, ò, ù: press ` and directly after that, the vowel. (Note that ` is slightly different slightly different from ‘ … on my keyboard, it is located right of the left-side Shift key.)
For ä, ë, ï, ö, ü: press ” and directly after that, the vowel.
For ã, ñ, õ: press ˜ and directly after that, the letter.

Diacritical Characters

Define diacritical mark. Diacritical mark synonyms, diacritical mark pronunciation, diacritical mark translation, English dictionary definition of diacritical mark. Vowel Diacritics. This table is organized by accent diacritic, then vowel. See the HTML Accent Chart or the Old English HTML codes for capital letters with accents. For each combination, codes in bold teal are entity codes or decimal Unicode numeric codes. Welcome to Useful Shortcuts, THE Alt Code resource! If you are already familiar with using alt codes, simply select the alt code category you need from the table below. If you need help using alt codes find and note down the alt code you need then visit our instructions for using alt codes page. For ALT codes for letters with accents or diacritical marks that are used in other foreign languages, visit ALT Codes for Latin Letters with Accents or Diacritical Marks used in Foreign Languages. For the the complete list of the first 256 Windows ALT Codes, visit Windows ALT Codes for Special Characters & Symbols. Letters with diacritical marks, grouped alphabetically. Finding the right letter can be a time-consuming process. This chart was made in the hope that it will make that chore easier. For the convenience of users who may not be familiar with the names or pronunciations of some letters, I've grouped letters here by general appearance.