How many letters are in the French alphabet?

The French alphabet uses the same 26 base Latin letters as English. On top of those it uses accented forms and two ligatures, which are variants of base letters rather than separate alphabet entries.

What accents does French use?

French uses the acute accent (é), grave accent (à, è, ù), circumflex (â, ê, î, ô, û), diaeresis or tréma (ë, ï, ü, ÿ), and the cedilla (ç). These appear on specific vowels plus the c.

How do I type é on a Mac?

Hold Option and press E, release, then press the letter — Option+E then E gives é. On a Mac you can also press and hold the base vowel key to get an accent picker.

How do I type accents on Windows?

Use the Alt code by holding Alt and typing the decimal code on the numeric keypad, for example Alt+0233 for é. Windows users can also enable the US-International keyboard layout for dead keys.

These are ligatures: œ in words like cœur and sœur, and æ in a few borrowed words like et cætera. They are typed with Option+Q (œ) and Option+' (æ) on a Mac.

French Alphabet & Diacritic Reference

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The French Alphabet & Diacritic Reference lists every character you need to write French correctly: the 26 base letters and the 14 accented vowels, cedilla, and ligatures, each with its accent name, Unicode code point, and the exact keystrokes for macOS and Windows. Filter by letter or accent name, then click any character to copy it.

How it works

French is written with the standard 26-letter Latin alphabet plus a fixed set of diacritics applied to certain letters:

Acute (accent aigu) on é only.
Grave (accent grave) on à, è, ù.
Circumflex (accent circonflexe) on â, ê, î, ô, û.
Diaeresis (tréma) on ë, ï, ü, ÿ, marking a separately pronounced vowel.
Cedilla (cédille) on ç, giving a soft /s/ sound before a, o, u.
Ligatures œ (e dans l’o) and æ.

Each entry stores the Unicode code point (e.g. é = U+00E9), the macOS dead-key sequence (Option+E then E), and the Windows Alt code (Alt+0233).

Tips and notes

On macOS you can press and hold a vowel key to pop up an accent picker, which is often faster than dead keys. On Windows, enabling the US-International layout turns ', `, ^, and ~ into dead keys so you type the accent then the vowel. The Alt codes shown use the decimal Code Page 1252 values and require a physical numeric keypad with Num Lock on. Code points are given so you can also use your platform’s Unicode hex input where supported.