How to use the remove letter accents
- 1Paste your text into Text with accents.
- 2Keep Convert special letters ticked to turn ß, æ, ø and ł into plain letters as well.
- 3Tick German style umlauts for ä → ae, or Also convert ligatures and look-alikes for fi → fi.
- 4Copy the result from Text without accents.
Example
Crème brûlée at the Café Müller in São Paulo, Łódź and Ærøskøbing. Straße – naïve – fiancé
Creme brulee at the Cafe Muller in Sao Paulo, Lodz and Aeroskobing. Strasse – naive – fiance
Default settings. ß becomes “ss” and Æ becomes “Ae”. The “fi” ligature stays until you tick Also convert ligatures and look-alikes; the dashes are punctuation and are not changed.
How accent removal works
Unicode can store “é” either as one character or as “e” followed by a combining acute accent (U+0301). The tool converts each character to the decomposed form (Unicode normalization form NFD) and deletes the combining marks, leaving the base letter. This handles accents, cedillas, tildes, umlauts, rings, carons and stacked marks such as Vietnamese “ệ”, and it works for Greek and Cyrillic letters with marks too (ά → α, й → и).
Digits, punctuation and letters without marks are left exactly as they are.
Special cases: ß, æ, ø, ł
Some letters aren't a base letter plus a mark, so decomposition doesn't touch them. Convert special letters maps them explicitly:
| Letter | Becomes |
|---|---|
| ß, ẞ | ss, SS |
| æ, œ | ae, oe |
| ø, ł, đ | o, l, d |
| ð, þ | d, th |
| ı (dotless i) | i |
A capital that becomes two letters follows the next letter's case: “Æble” → “Aeble”, “ÆRØ” → “AERO”. German style umlauts writes ä, ö, ü as ae, oe, ue, the usual German spelling when umlauts aren't available (“Müller” → “Mueller”).
Plain text for URLs and file names
Accented letters in URLs are percent-encoded (é becomes %C3%A9), which makes links long and hard to read, and some older systems and file shares mishandle them in file names. Removing accents first gives clean, predictable names. For a finished URL slug with lowercase letters and hyphens, run the result through the URL slug generator, or change capitals with the case converter.
When not to remove accents
Accents carry meaning in many languages: Spanish “año” (year) and “ano” (anus), French “interné” and “interne”, Portuguese “avô” and “avó” (grandfather and grandmother). Keep the original spelling in anything people read, and in names on official records. Search engines and most modern software handle accented letters correctly, so remove accents only where a system really requires plain ASCII.
Is my text private?
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your text is not uploaded to our servers.