Spanish accents: copy and paste

The Spanish accented letters

Spanish uses five vowels with an accent mark, one letter with a tilde, one u with two dots, and two upside-down punctuation marks.

In Spanish, tilde means the written accent mark itself, so á is "a con tilde". English uses "tilde" only for the wavy line on ñ. Spanish has no grave accents (à) or circumflexes (â); if you see those, the word is French or Portuguese.

What the accent mark does

The accent on á, é, í, ó, and ú does not change the sound of the vowel. It marks the stressed syllable when the word breaks Spanish’s default stress rules:

• Words ending in a vowel, n, or s are stressed on the second-to-last syllable: casa (CA-sa), hablan (HA-blan).
• Words ending in any other consonant are stressed on the last syllable: hablar (ha-BLAR), ciudad (ciu-DAD).
• Any word that breaks these rules carries an accent on the stressed vowel: café, canción, árbol, teléfono.

The accent also tells apart words that are spelled the same but mean different things:

Question and exclamation words take an accent too: qué, quién, cómo, dónde, cuándo, cuánto, cuál. That holds in indirect questions (No sé dónde está: I don’t know where it is).

Ñ is its own letter

Ñ is not an n with decoration: it is a separate letter of the Spanish alphabet, called eñe, that comes right after n in the dictionary. It sounds like the "ny" in canyon: niño (NEE-nyo), mañana (ma-NYA-na).

Leaving the tilde off changes the word. Año means year; ano means anus. "Feliz año nuevo" without the tilde is a classic, and unfortunate, typo.

Ü: the u you pronounce

In the syllables gue and gui, the u is silent: guerra (GEH-rra), guitarra (gee-TA-rra). The two dots on ü tell you to pronounce it: pingüino (peen-GWEE-no), vergüenza (ver-GWEN-sa), bilingüe (bee-LEEN-gweh).

Ü only appears before e or i, so it is the rarest of the Spanish accented letters.

¿ and ¡: upside-down punctuation

Spanish opens every question with ¿ and every exclamation with ¡, so a reader knows from the start how to read the sentence aloud.

• ¿Dónde está el baño? Where is the bathroom?
• ¡Qué bonito! How pretty!

The opening mark goes where the question or exclamation starts, which is not always the start of the sentence: Y tú, ¿de dónde eres? (And you, where are you from?). In casual texting many people skip the opening marks; in anything formal, include them.

Do capital letters keep their accents?

Yes. The Real Academia Española is clear that capitals keep their accent marks: Ángel, África, ÉXITO. Old typewriters could not print them, which is where the habit of dropping them came from.

Keyboard shortcuts for Spanish accents

If you type Spanish often, a shortcut is faster than copying. On Windows, hold Alt and type the code on the number pad. On a Mac, press the first combination, release, then type the letter.

On a phone, press and hold the letter to see its accented versions. For step-by-step instructions on every device, including the US International keyboard, see how to type Spanish accents.