What Are Acute Accent Marks?
Acute accent marks, also called diacritical marks, slant to the right over the tops of certain vowels and consonants. Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek languages use them.
English has incorporated countless Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese words, and many of their vowels take the accent mark. For example, the French and Spanish word café often appears in English with the accent mark.
Acute accent marks are on both uppercase and lowercase vowels:
How to Accent Letters on Mac Computers
Enter characters with accent marks on a Mac using the Accent menu or the Emoji & Symbols menu.
Use the Accent Menu
On a Mac computer keyboard, access the Accent menu via keyboard inputs.
Hold down the letter you want to add an accent to for several seconds. A small menu pops up with different accent options for that letter. Each option for a particular letter appears with a number underneath it. Press the number key for the version you want to use on the keyboard. Or, use your mouse to click the mark or its number in the accent menu. For example, to produce an accented a, press and hold the a key. Simultaneously, select the number 2 on the keyboard or click the number 2 in the accent menu with your mouse. For the uppercase version of the character, press the Shift key before you type and hold the letter you want to accent. The symbol you select appears in your document.
Use the Emoji & Symbols Menu
To use the Emoji & Symbols menu (called Special Characters in older versions of the software), position your cursor in a place where you can enter text.
Click the Edit menu at the top of the screen and select Emoji & Symbols. Expand the menu by clicking the icon in the upper-right corner. Select a symbol category from the left panel or enter a symbol name in the search field and locate the symbol you want in the central window.
Add Accented Letters on Windows PCs
On Windows PCs, enable Num Lock. Hold down the Alt key while typing the appropriate number code on the numeric keypad to create characters with acute accent marks.
For Windows, locate the character map by clicking Start > Windows Accessories > Character Map. You can also click Windows and type character map in the search box. Select the letter you need, copy it, and paste it into the document.
HTML and Accents
Computer programmers use HTML (HyperText Markup Language) as the basic computer language to build web pages. It describes and defines the content of a web page.
In HTML, you render characters with acute accent marks by typing the & (ampersand symbol), then the letter (A, e, U, and so on), the word acute, and then ; (a semicolon) without any spaces between them. For example, following this sequence with the letter e should result in an e with an accent mark.
Adding Accents on Mobile Devices
If you are typing on an iOS or Android mobile device, hold your finger on the letter that you want to accent. You’ll see a pop-up of the available diacritical marks for that letter. Slide your finger up to the accented letter and release it to place it in a document or text message.
Other Diacritical Marks
The acute accent isn’t the only diacritical mark you may occasionally need. Locate other diacritical marks in the same way as the acute accent. Commonly used options include:
The grave accent (`). The cedilla is attached to the bottom of a letter, such as in the word façade. The circumflex accent (ˆ). The umlaut is two dots above a letter, such as in coöperate, among others.
