Alt Codes for Typing

Chances are, at some point, you will want to try and write something in German on a computer. Be it for an essay, an e-mail, a facebook message or to look up a word in an online dictionary, it is important to know how to type all of the special German characters. But on a standard English keyboard, there are no vowels with umlauts, or the Eszett; so how do you make them pop up on your screen?

The answer is using “Alt Codes”. Press and hold the “Alt” key on your keyboard, and then on the numbers pad, press the number combination below that is associated with your desired letter. Then let go of the “Alt” key. Your desired letter should appear as soon as you release the “Alt” key. If it doesn’t, make sure that your “Num Lock” is on, and try again. If you make a typo while entering the numbers, a different character may appear. Don’t worry, you didn’t break your computer– you just summoned up a different Alt Code. Just delete it and try again.

If you are like me in college, and didn’t have a keyboard with a Numbers Pad, it is generally accepted to represent an umlauted letter with an “e” after the what would be the umlauted vowel (Ex: “ä” would be typed “ae” or “ö” would be typed “oe”). Substituting for the “ß” gets a little tricky because there are specific rules about using the “ß” versus a double “s”.

Microsoft Office products also usually have the “Insert Symbol” option. You can dig through all of the available symbols and create a document with each of the special characters from which to copy and paste.

If all else fails, you can use Google to search for a word with the umlauted letter or Eszett from which you can copy and paste the desired character into your document/webpage.

Now, because you made it all the way down to the bottom of my post, I’ll let you in on a few extra Alt Code “secrets”. You can get a small umlauted “u” in a circle, a color-inverted small umlauted “u” in a circle and a symbol that represents my relationship to the German language:

Alt+1 = ☺; Alt +2 = ☻ and Alt + 3 = ♥ .

Thanks for reading!