How to get special characters on an iPhone or iPad

This is a simple tip for a feature that has been around for a while now, but the question still come up from time to time: How can I get accented or special characters on my iPhone or iPad keyboard?

Do you ever need these?

Hold down
The answer is simple enough once you know it; hold down on any vowel while typing and a full range of accented characters for that letter will appear, simply slide your finger along the list to the one you want and let go, and presto! you've got the character. You can now impress you friends with fancy names by spelling them correctly.

Note that this tip also works when typing on a Mac, pretty cool.

More than vowels!
There are a whole range of special characters you can access this way. For example, ever wonder where the ¢ sign is? If you guessed under the C you would be wrong, but if you guessed under the $ you are right, there are a bunch of currency signs under there.

I could tell you where all the characters are, but that would take away a lot of the fun of finding them. So here is a list of some fun characters to look for:

• Ż
• ¿
• …
• §
• ₩
• Ł
• Æ

You may never need them, but then again you never know…

Beyond the keyboard
If for some reason you need more special characters than you can get on the onscreen keyboard the app Character Pad can help you, it as over 250 special characters.


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