H with accent ĥ ħ ḧ ḩ ȟ ḣ

Which accented h do you need?

The accent tells you the language. Pick the keyboard for yours and every letter it needs is one click away.

ĥ h with circumflex: A small inverted V. In French it usually marks a vowel that once had a following s (forêt, hôtel). Also used in Portuguese, Romanian, Welsh and Esperanto. Used in Esperanto.

ħ h with stroke: A bar through the letter. Danish and Norwegian ø, Polish ł, Croatian and Vietnamese đ, and Maltese ħ are the common ones. Used in Maltese.

ḧ h with diaeresis: Two dots above a letter. Called an umlaut in German (ä, ö, ü), where it changes the vowel sound, and a diaeresis in French, Dutch and Spanish, where it shows two vowels are pronounced separately.

ḩ h with cedilla: A small hook under the letter. French and Portuguese ç sounds like s; Turkish ç and ş are ch and sh; Latvian and Romanian use it under other consonants.

ȟ h with caron: A small V above the letter, also called a háček or wedge. Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian and Lithuanian use it for sounds like ch, sh and zh.

ḣ h with dot above: A single dot above the letter. Turkish dotted İ, Polish ż, Lithuanian ė, Maltese ċ, ġ, ż and traditional Irish lenition all use it.

How to type h with an accent on Windows

None of the accented forms of h are in the Windows-1252 code page, so there are no classic Alt codes. Use the methods below instead.

US-International keyboard (dead keys)

Switch to the United States-International layout (Settings → Time & Language → Language → English → Options → Add a keyboard). Then press the accent key, release it, and press the letter:

• Shift+6 (^) then the letter gives ĥ
• Shift+' (") then the letter gives ḧ
• ' then c (for ç only) gives ḩ

Emoji and symbol panel

Press Win+., open the Symbols tab (Ω), choose Latin symbols and click the letter. Works in every app and needs no numpad. Character Map (search it in the Start menu) does the same for older versions of Windows.

How to type h with an accent on a Mac

The English press-and-hold menu has no accented h, so use a dead key or the Character Viewer.

Character Viewer

Press Control+⌘+Space, type "h with" in the search box and double-click the letter. For carons, macrons, ogoneks and other marks that the US layout cannot type, add the ABC Extended input source (System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources) which has dead keys for all of them.

How to type h with an accent on iPhone, iPad and Android

The default English keyboard has no accented h under press-and-hold. Either add a language keyboard that includes it (Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards on iPhone; Gboard → Languages on Android) or copy the letter from this page and paste it.

For frequent use, save a shortcut: on iPhone go to Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement; on Android open Gboard → Dictionary → Personal dictionary. Enter the accented letter as the phrase and a short code as the shortcut.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Google Docs

Microsoft Word

For any form, type its Unicode hex code and press Alt+X: 0125 → ĥ, 0127 → ħ, 1E27 → ḧ, 1E29 → ḩ, and so on. You can also use Insert → Symbol → More Symbols with the subset set to Latin-1 Supplement or Latin Extended-A. AutoCorrect (File → Options → Proofing) can replace a code such as h~ with the letter automatically.

Excel and Google Sheets

Alt codes and paste work in cells. For a formula, use =UNICHAR(293) in Excel or =CHAR(293) in Google Sheets to get ĥ.

Google Docs

Go to Insert → Special characters, then search "h with" or draw the letter in the sketch box. Docs also accepts Alt codes on Windows and Option dead keys on Mac. Under Tools → Preferences → Substitutions you can make Docs replace a code of your choosing with the accented letter.

H with accent in HTML, CSS and code

Because these are ordinary Unicode characters, you can paste them straight into any UTF-8 file. The escapes only matter when the encoding is uncertain or you cannot type the letter.

Building any accent with combining marks

If you need a form Unicode does not precompose, or you are typing in an app that only has a plain h, type the letter and follow it with a combining mark. The mark sits on the previous character. Click any example to copy the two-character sequence.

In Word, type the letter, then the mark's hex code (for example 0301 for acute) and press Alt+X. On a Mac the Character Viewer lists them under Combining Diacritical Marks. Note that search engines and spell checkers treat a combined sequence differently from a precomposed letter, so prefer the precomposed form when one exists.

Troubleshooting

• The Alt code types something else. Add the leading zero (Alt+0241, not Alt+241) and use the numeric keypad with Num Lock on. Laptops without a numpad need Win + . instead.
• Press-and-hold shows nothing. On a Mac, key repeat may be enabled instead of the accent menu; run defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true in Terminal and log out. On phones, the letter may not be in your keyboard's language.
• Wrong accent. ĥ (circumflex) and ħ (stroke) look similar at small sizes but are different letters; a search for one will not find the other.
• A box or question mark appears after pasting. The font in that app lacks the glyph. Switch to a font with full Latin coverage such as Arial, Calibri, Noto Sans or Segoe UI.

Frequently asked questions