How to Type É & Other Accent Marks on the iPhone Keyboard

Your iOS keyboard is capable of amazing feats—you can now drag your finger around it to type, the emoji selection is unmatched, and you can add French accent marks (and others) easily. Keep in mind that these tips will work whether you are sending an iMessage, writing an email, or creating any other text on your phone. We’re going to show you how to type é on an iPhone and add other accent marks using a text message as an example.

Related: How to Switch between Keyboards on Your iPhone

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• How to Type E with Accent Marks
• How to Type N with Accent Marks
• How to Type Other Accents & Special Characters

How to Type E with Accent Marks

E with an accent mark is probably the most common foreign-language character that we English speakers use. Café, fiancé, exposé, the list goes on. Fortunately, iOS has made it easy to type é on the iPhone. Take the word café, for example.

1. Go to your iOS keyboard and type C-a-f.
2. Next, instead of typing the “e,” press and hold the “e” character.
3. iOS will display several choices above the “e” that you can choose.
   
   
    
4. Slide your finger over the one you want.
5. Voilà! (See what we did there?)

How to Type an N with Accent Marks

Fortunately, Apple is consistent in how to add accent marks on an iPhone. Here’s how to add some polish to your jalapeños by adding the wiggly line (called a tilde) above the n:

1. Go to your iOS keyboard and type j-a-l-a-p-e
2. Next, instead of typing the “n,” press and hold the “n” character.
3. iOS will display several choices above the “n” that you can choose.
   
   
    
4. Slide your finger over the one you want.
5. Spicy!

How to Type Other Accents & Special Characters

Now that you are comfortable with pressing and holding your keyboard characters to add accent marks on your iPhone, you can have all kinds of fun typing Spanish accent or French accent marks. There are also German characters, other money symbols such as the euro, cents, pounds, and yen, temperature symbols, and copyright symbols.

Additionally, in Safari, when you are typing a domain name, you can press and hold the “.” character and it will offer you .us, .net, .org, .edu, and .com extensions. It’s slick.

So, next time you want to meet your friends for coffee, you can ask them to meet you at the café for some crème brûlée. Pretty impressive.