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How to type Hungarian accents (ő ű) on an English keyboard

Type á, é, í, ó, ö, ő, ú, ü and ű on a US keyboard on Mac, Windows and Linux, and why ő and ű are the ones most methods get wrong.

Hungarian has nine accented vowels: á, é, í, ó, ö, ő, ú, ü, ű. Seven also appear in other European languages and have common keyboard shortcuts. The hard two are ő and ű, with the double acute accent. Only Hungarian uses them, and many of the usual shortcuts do not have them.

That is how the familiar mistake appears: õ with a tilde or û with a hat in place of ő and ű. They come from old fonts and encodings that had no room for the Hungarian letters. They look close, but they are different characters, and to a Hungarian reader they look wrong. Here is how to type the right ones.

On a Mac

Press and hold. Hold a letter key to see the accented forms available in the current app and input source. Choose a letter by clicking it or pressing its number. The menu does not appear in every app and may not contain every letter you need. For a missing letter, use a language layout or Character Viewer.

Option shortcuts. On the standard ABC (US) layout, Option + E and then a vowel types the acute (á, é, í, ó, ú), and Option + U and then a vowel types the umlaut (ö, ü). There is no shortcut for ő and ű on this layout. The ABC - Extended input source offers more marks. Add it in Keyboard settings, then choose Show Keyboard Viewer from the Input menu. Hold Option to see its dead keys, press the key for the mark, then type the letter. Use Character Viewer if the letter is not available.

The Hungarian layout. Open System Settings → Keyboard → Text Input → Edit, press +, and add Hungarian. Use Keyboard Viewer to check the key positions. Switch with Control + Space or the globe key if it is set to change input sources.

For an occasional letter, open Character Viewer with Control + Command + Space. Expand the viewer if needed, search for the letter, and double-click it to insert it.

On Windows

The Hungarian keyboard. Open Settings → Time & language → Language & region, add Hungarian or only its keyboard, and switch with Windows + Space. It has a key for every one of the nine letters. The price is that almost everything else moves: it is QWERTZ, the 0 sits left of 1, and brackets, the at sign and many other symbols go to AltGr. Windows also has Hungarian 101-key, made for US-style keyboards that lack one key of the European ones.

US-International. ' and then a vowel types á, é, í, ó, ú, and " and then o or u types ö, ü. It has no ő and ű.

Alt codes. The leading-zero codes below use Windows-1252, the Western European code page. Results can differ with the system code page. Hold Alt and type a number on the number pad with Num Lock on: 0225 á, 0233 é, 0237 í, 0243 ó, 0246 ö, 0250 ú, 0252 ü. Windows-1252 has no codes of this kind for ő and ű. Be careful with the codes you may find online for them: 0245 is õ and 0251 is û, the wrong letters. In Microsoft Word you can type the Unicode number and press Alt + X: 0151 gives ő and 0171 gives ű.

On Linux

GNOME and KDE offer Hungarian, Hungarian (QWERTY) and several 101-key and 102-key versions. With a Compose key you can stay on the US layout: Compose, =, o types ő, Compose, =, u types ű, Compose, ', a types á, and Compose, ", o types ö.

Why it is still tiring

Hungarian puts accents everywhere, in word stems and in endings: később, mielőtt, nagymamához, velünk. And the choice is not only "accent or no accent". One plain o can stand for o, ó, ö or ő, and kor, kór and kör are all different words. With the Hungarian layout you lose your US punctuation. With shortcuts, you stop several times in every sentence.

Type without accents, get Hungarian

Typeet does the choosing for you. You keep the US layout and type Hungarian without accents. When you finish a word with a space or punctuation, Typeet writes the correct spelling, with the real ő and ű:

For each word, Typeet compares how common each spelling is in Hungarian and in English, and where two spellings are both common, the words around it decide. Words that are not in its list are built from a known stem and ending. English words, iPhone, camelCase and words with digits stay as they are.

On Hungarian test sentences it had not seen before, from the Tatoeba collection, Typeet adds 97.4% of the missing letters, 98.4% of all words come out right, and it leaves 100% of English words alone. It knows 514,773 Hungarian words. We also typed Gárdonyi Géza's Egri csillagok without its accents, 139,267 words, and 94.5% came back right.

When it picks the wrong one of two real words, press Option + Backspace on a Mac, or Ctrl + Backspace on Windows and Linux, to switch it to its other spelling. Press Backspace right after a fix to undo it; undo the same word ten times and Typeet leaves that word alone.

Typeet works in every app on macOS 13 or later, Windows 10 or later, and Linux. Everything runs on your computer, and nothing you type is stored or sent. It is free for 14 days, then a one-time purchase of $19.

Questions

How do I type ő on an English keyboard?

On a Mac, use the Hungarian input source or find ő in Character Viewer. On Linux, press Compose, =, o. On Windows, add the Hungarian keyboard; there is no standard Windows-1252 Alt + number pad code for it.

Is õ the same as ő?

No. õ has a tilde and belongs to Estonian and Portuguese. ő has a double acute and is Hungarian. Search and spell checkers treat them as different letters.

What is the Alt code for ű?

There is no standard Windows-1252 Alt + number pad code. Alt + 0251 gives û, which is wrong. In Word, type 0171 and press Alt + X.

Can Typeet tell kor, kór and kör apart?

It picks the most likely spelling from how common each word is and from the words around it. When it picks the wrong one, Option + Backspace or Ctrl + Backspace switches it.