What are the German-specific characters?

German adds four letters beyond the basic Latin alphabet: the umlauted vowels ä, ö and ü (each with an uppercase form) and the sharp-s ß, plus the recently standardised capital sharp-s ẞ. Everything else uses the standard 26 letters.

What is the Unicode code point for ß?

The sharp-s ß is U+00DF, with the HTML entity ß and numeric reference ß. Its uppercase counterpart ẞ is U+1E9E, which is much newer and was added to standard orthography in 2017.

How do I type umlauts on Windows?

Hold Alt and type the four-digit code on the numeric keypad: Alt+0228 gives ä, Alt+0246 gives ö, Alt+0252 gives ü, and Alt+0223 gives ß. The uppercase umlauts use Alt+0196, Alt+0214 and Alt+0220.

How do I type umlauts on a Mac?

Press Option+u to arm the umlaut dead key, release, then type the vowel: Option+u then a gives ä. The sharp-s ß is Option+s. Hold Shift for the uppercase vowel forms.

Should I use HTML entities or the raw characters?

On modern UTF-8 web pages you can use the raw characters ä, ö, ü and ß directly. HTML entities like ä remain a safe fallback for legacy encodings or contexts where the raw byte stream might be mangled.

German Character Set Reference

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German extends the Latin alphabet with four special letters: the umlauts ä, ö, ü and the sharp-s ß (Eszett), plus the modern capital ẞ. This page is a quick reference giving each character’s Unicode code point, HTML entity, numeric reference, and the keyboard shortcuts to type it on Windows and macOS. Every value is click-to-copy.

How it works

Each character has a single Unicode code point — for example ä is U+00E4 and ß is U+00DF — which uniquely identifies it across all platforms. For web pages you can write the character directly on a UTF-8 page, or use a named HTML entity like ä and ß, or the equivalent numeric reference such as ä.

To type the characters, the reference lists the Windows Alt code (hold Alt, type the digits on the numeric keypad) and the macOS combination (the Option+u dead key for umlauts, Option+s for ß).

The capital sharp-s

For most of its history ß had no uppercase form, so words were capitalised with SS — STRASSE. In 2017 the Council for German Orthography adopted the capital ẞ (U+1E9E) as an official alternative, so STRAẞE is now also valid. It remains less common and is not present on most keyboards by default.

Tips

On modern systems prefer the raw characters — they are readable, sort correctly, and work everywhere UTF-8 is supported. Keep HTML entities in reserve for templates, email headers, or legacy databases where the raw bytes could be re-encoded. If you frequently type German, switching to the German keyboard layout is faster than memorising Alt codes, since ä, ö, ü and ß each get their own key.