Every hidden special character on your iPhone keyboard that you can unlock right now

There are over 115 secret characters hiding behind your iPhone’s default keyboard, and I’m not talking about what you see when you hit the “123”or “#+=”keys. These special compound characters can include accents, periods, and other diacritics, and you’ll even see some weird typographic characters like the section mark, upside-down marks, and the ppm symbol. Here’s how you’ll find them.

The characters found here can be found on the English (US) keyboard in iOS 15, but you’ll also find most of them in older versions of iOS as well as iPadOS. Keyboards in other languages ​​will have their own hidden character sets.

In the default English keyboard, you will find compound characters with accents such as acute (á, ó, Ú), circumflex (Â, ê, î), engraving (Ò, ù, Í), and tilde (ã, Ñ, x); dots such as umlaut (Ö, ü), and other diacritics such as macron (ā, À), overlay (å, Å), and slash (ø, Ø). They are used to change the pitch of a letter, emphasize syllables, indicate stress, mark a letter as long or heavy, make independent letters different from their unaccented versions, and more.

Below I have listed all the hidden characters that you will find on the English (US) keyboard of your iPhone. All these characters are available by long pressing the corresponding key. On your computer, you can use the Shift key and the corresponding key, the Option key and the corresponding key, or a character keycode instead. We don’t have these options on the iPhone, so instead these actions are delegated to a long press.

Diacritics

This first group of characters, which currently includes 93 special characters, uses diacritics. These are letters with added accents or independent letters with accents. In most cases, if a lowercase letter has a certain diacritic, its uppercase version will too, but not always.

Some of these will come in handy when using iMessage effect triggers, but you’re more likely to use them when writing resumes, hand-to-hand combat, expose, pâté, rose, øre, and other words that are sometimes found in English with an accent.

a ---------------------
à (grave)
á (acute)
â (circumflex)
ä (umlaut or diaeresis)
æ (ash / ligature)
ã (tilde)
å (overring)
ā (macron)

A ---------------------
À (grave)
Á (acute)
 (circumflex)
Ä (umlaut or diaeresis)
Æ (ash / ligature)
à (tilde)
Å (overring)
Ā (macron)

Z ---------
Ž (caron)
Ź (acute)
Ż (overdot)

Special symbols

This second group currently has 25 special characters, and these can be found behind certain keys in the keyboard options “123”and “#+=”. Here you will find various dashes such as en dashes (–) and em dashes (—), degree sign (º), currency symbols, and various types of quotation marks. You will also see reversed punctuation marks ¿ and ¡, which are used to add extra emphasis in Spanish. For example, ¡feliz cumpleanos! These symbols will also come in handy when composing iMessage effect triggers.

0 ---------------------------------------------
º masculine ordinal indicator or degree symbol)

- ---------
– (en dash)
— (em dash)
• (bullet)

= ---------------------
≈ (approximately equal)
≠ (not equal to)

Hidden characters in other keyboards

The two sections above only cover the special characters of the standard English (US) iPhone keyboard, not the entire iPhone. Apple includes quite a few secrets for iOS keyboards if you know where to look. Take Kana or Romaji keyboards for example, which include emoji buttons that host collections of funny text faces to send to friends when you’re tired of emoji.