Type Characters With Cedilla Accent Marks

The cedilla is a diacritical mark that denotes different pronunciation of the letter it appears beneath — in most cases the letter C. Its appearance in English comes with words from French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Occitan. Characters with cedilla diacritical accent marks have a small tail beneath the letter C. Perhaps the most familiar word in English using the cedilla is façade.

How to Type Characters With the Cedilla Diacritical Mark

Cedilla accent marks appear most often on the upper and lower case letter C in English, as in Ç and ç. Producing the character on a computer depends on your operating system. If you're working in HTML such as for website content, use a special character code to produce the characters in browsers.

Some applications configure special keystrokes for creating characters with diacriticals like the cedilla accent marks. Check the software manual or help files if the keystrokes shown below don't work for creating cedilla accent marks.

Make C With an Accent Mark in Mac, Windows, and HTML

On a Mac, hold down the letter C key (or Shift + C for capital letter) until a popup menu offers a set of character choices. Click the ç, or press the corresponding number key indicated. Alternately, press Option + C for the ç, or Option + Shift + C for the capital letter with the cedilla accent marks. 

On a Windows PC, hold down ALT while typing the appropriate number code on your numeric keypad to create the cedilla accent marks. Don't use the numbers at the top of the keyboard. Use the numeric keypad and be sure Num Lock is enabled:

• 0199 (Ç)
• 0231 (ç) 

In HTML, create cedilla accented characters by typing the & (the ampersand symbol), the letter (such as C or c), and then the letters cedil, followed by a semicolon. For example: 

Ç

Produces Ç.

ç

Produces ç.