Romanian Alphabet Reference

31 Romanian letters: ă, â, î, ș, ț with Unicode and cedilla traps

Browse all 31 Romanian letters with Unicode code points and HTML entities, highlighting the ș/ş and ț/ţ confusion between the correct comma-below letters and legacy cedilla variants.

How many letters are in the Romanian alphabet?

Thirty-one: the 26 base Latin letters plus five with diacritics — ă, â, î, ș and ț. K, Q, W and Y appear mainly in loanwords but are part of the alphabet.

This reference lists every letter of the Romanian alphabet — all 31 of them — with each letter’s Unicode code point and HTML entity, and it flags the notorious comma-versus-cedilla trap on ș and ț.

How it works

The Romanian alphabet is the 26 Latin base letters plus five diacritic letters: ă (a-breve), â (a-circumflex), î (i-circumflex), ș (s-comma) and ț (t-comma). Each row shows the upper- and lower-case forms, the lower-case code point (for example U+0219), the numeric HTML entity, and a short usage note. Search matches letters, notes, or code points, and the copy button writes the real character to your clipboard.

The cedilla trap

Two letters are routinely encoded wrong:

  • Correct: ș = U+0219 (s with comma below). Wrong: ş = U+015F (s with cedilla).
  • Correct: ț = U+021B (t with comma below). Wrong: ţ = U+0163 (t with cedilla).

The cedilla forms came from early code pages that lacked the comma letters, and they still leak into documents today. They render almost identically but are different characters, which breaks search, sorting and matching. The reference marks each affected row so you can copy the correct comma version.

Notes

â and î spell the same sound /ɨ/; modern orthography uses î at the start and end of a word and â in the middle (for example în but pâine). The letter ă is a separate schwa vowel and sorts right after a.