You can easily enter special characters such as copyright (©), trademark (™), and registration (®) on your Mac and iPhone without installing any app. macOS and iOS have built-in features that take care of this for you.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to enter these and any other special characters in a text field on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
How to enter special characters on Mac
- Press Option + G to enter the copyright symbol: ©
- Press Option + R to enter a registered character: ®
- Press Option + 2 to enter the trademark symbol: ™
Follow these steps to open additional keyboard shortcuts for entering other special characters:
1) Open “System Preferences”and click “Keyboard”.
2) Click Input Sources.
3) Look at the left sidebar. If you only have one input source/keyboard added, it should be selected. In this case, go to step 4.
If you’ve added more than one input source, such as US, Australian, British, Canadian English, ABC – India, and so on, select the one you want from the sidebar.
Advice. If you don’t speak multiple languages or work in multiple languages, it’s a good idea to clear unnecessary added input sources here by selecting them and clicking the minus button.
4) Press the Option key and it will show some special characters in the key location where the normal alphabets are (a, b, c…) etc. For example, when you press the Option key on a US keyboard, the g character is displayed in the location of the g key ©. This means that when you press Option + g, this symbol (in this case ©) will appear.
5) Similarly, when you press Option + Shift, additional keys with special characters will be displayed. For example, when you press Option and Shift at the same time, the k key shows the Apple logo (). This means that pressing Option + Shift + K on your Mac will display the Apple logo .
Here’s how you can learn more about entering special characters on your Mac’s keyboard. Just remember that these keyboard shortcuts differ depending on the input source. For example, if the US input source is selected, pressing Option + 2 will enter the trademark symbol (™). But if you’re using British input sources, pressing Option + 2 enters the euro symbol (€).
As stated, if you’re only using one input source like the US, then this shouldn’t be a problem. If you’ve added more than one, select the one you want from your Mac’s menu bar.
How to Enter Copyright, Trademark, Registered and Other Symbols on iPhone and iPad
You see some special characters when you press 123 and then press #+= on your iPhone or iPad keyboard. But they do not show copyright ©, trademark ™ and registered keys ®. Therefore, the easiest way to enter these characters on iOS and iPadOS is to use the text replacement feature.
Follow these steps to enter the copyright©, trademark™, and registered® symbols on iPhone and iPad:
1) Copy copyright ©, trademark ™ or registered symbol ® from here or from any other site on the Internet.
2) Open the Settings app and go to General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.
3) Click the plus button.
4) In the Phrase section, paste the copied copyright symbol ©, trademark ™ or registered symbol ®.
5) In the Shortcut section, enter a short, relevant word.
For example, the label “copr”can be used for the copyright symbol. Copr is not a real word; thus, whenever you type “copr”, it automatically enters the © character. You can use a real word like “copyright”as a shortcut, but then every time you type “copyright”your iPhone will automatically replace the word with a © symbol. So it’s best to use a short random string of alphabets as a shortcut. For a trademark, you can use trdm, and for a registered one, you can use regis.
6) Click Save. Now you can repeat the steps above to add text replacement for all the characters you want.
7) Open a text field like the Notes app and type in a shortcut (copr or whatever you entered in step 5). The moment you touch the spacebar, it will change to the corresponding symbol (© in this example).
Here’s how you can use text replacement to type special characters and symbols on your iPhone and iPad. Also, note that text replacement is synced via iCloud to all your Apple devices such as other iPhones, iPads, and Macs. So, whenever you type a shortcut on your Mac, it also types a special character there.
Entering special characters in macOS and iOS
In many cases, using these characters instead of a word gives the best meaning and looks professional. Now you know how to enter copyright, trademark, registered, and many more special characters when typing on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Use this knowledge to improve your writing.