How to write special characters in Windows 11

Special characters (also known as diacritics) may be common in the language we write in, but there may also be some that we hardly ever use or that do not directly exist in the language we use.

If, for example, we are trying to learn another language, we usually see websites where hundreds of characters appear that we do not know how to put them in, or we find a document in which we have to write some of them. Adding them has been proven to be less convenient on Windows than it is on a Mac.

That’s why it’s interesting to know how we can use these space characters in Windows 11 if we badly need them and we can’t continue with our task because we don’t know how to write a specific one.

Touch keyboard

The easiest way to add special characters to Windows is to enable the touch keyboard.

The touch keyboard would appear automatically if we were using a Windows tablet or PC in tablet mode.

Since we don’t have a touch screen, which is fine, we can use the keyboard icon that appears on the taskbar on the right next to the date.

Let’s see how we can enable it:

• Click on the start menu and then type Parameter.
• Then we will time and language continue Writing.
• Inside we will see and expand where it is written Touch keyboard.
• we should note Show touch keyboard when no keyboard is connected.

There is another way to log in to the touch keyboard, as we just described, it does not work in all versions of Windows 11.

With this option, we can even choose how the touch keyboard will look like.

• Click on the start menu and type Parameter.
• Then we will Personalization.
• Inside we press on Virtual keyboard.
• The moment we enter we have different interesting parts like keyboard Theme, where we will put the one we like in multiple options.
• We can also change keyboard sizeif the keys have a background, key size and of course launch touch keyboard.

This is the moment when we can use the virtual keyboard to get the characters we’ve been talking about.

When we want to use them, we must do the following:

• As soon as we have a virtual keyboard on the screen, we do long press (mouse button) on the letter you want to use.
• then we will see various additional keys which show how you can write that letter with different symbols.
• Just need choose the one we want and it will automatically appear in the document that we need.
• If we want to add an emoji or GIF, we need to click on the emoji button. (He square and heart icon in the upper left corner of the keyboard).

Character Map

This is a somewhat old method, but it is still quite effective and works quite well.

We talked about adding special characters to Windows with Character Mapsomething similar to a touch keyboard, but not as well resolved.

To do this, we must do the following:

• We choose search icon (magnifying glass) on the taskbar and type characters.
• Then choose an application Character Map.
• Now we will see what the new window looks like, where we will have a bunch of special characters for a certain type of font.
• It can be changed by clicking the dropdown menu at the top.

emoji keyboard

Another keyboard that allows you to use special characters is the Windows emoji keyboard.

Its main purpose is emoji, that’s understandable, but there’s room inside for other types of text as well.

So we can use it:

• We are holding window key D we click on the dot.
• Then let’s see what it looks like emoji keyboard in the lower right corner of the screen.
• We click on symbols tab (fourth starting from the right) or go down until we find the desired symbols.
• Various character types can also be skipped using categories.

US keyboard

If we speak English and want to use a lot of special characters, we can use the US international keyboard for this purpose.

To add it to Windows we must follow the following steps:

• We are going to Parameterthen click on time and language and then in Region and language.
• Now we must go to preferred languages and (assuming we speak American English) press Add languagewe choose English United States) and then Next.
• At that moment it will load language, text-to-speech, speech and handwriting recognition. We must not check any options that are not already checked.
• Next, select the three points on the right and select language options.
• Let’s go to the “Keyboards” section, which probably contains only an icon that says US QWERTY.
• This is the layout we are using right now.
• We push the button Add a keyboard to the right of this option.
• In the pop-up menu that appears, scroll to US-International/QWERTY and we click.

Now we will always have the option to use a standard US keyboard or an international US keyboard.

If we want to know which of the two will be active, we can see it on the bottom right side. Right next to where we have a connection (WiFi or local) we should read ENG/US or ENG/INTERNATIONAL.

If we want to switch between one and the other, we must click where we have indicated in order for the popup menu to allow us to switch from one to the other.

This international keyboard has two ways to offer us special characters:

• Using alternate key right in combination with the corresponding letter to use combinations.
• Yes click symbol which we want to use and then letter with which we want to write it.

As you may have read, using special characters in Windows 11 is easier than you might think.

Yes, it’s true that normally we won’t use them much, but knowing how to use them in the moment will save a lot of headaches.