

In most cases, if a lowercase letter has a certain diacritic, its uppercase version will too, but not always. These are letters with added accent marks or independent letters with accent marks. This first group of characters uses diacritics, which currently includes 164 special characters on iOS 17 and later, or 93 special characters on iOS 16 and earlier. We don't have those options on the iPhone, so these actions are delegated to the long press instead. On your computer, you might be used to using the Shift key plus a corresponding key, the Option key plus a corresponding key, or a character keycode instead. These characters are accessible via a long press of the corresponding key. Don't Miss: 32 Things You Didn't Know About Your iPhone's Keyboardīelow, I've listed all of the hidden characters you'll find on your iPhone's English (US) keyboard.

You use these to change how the pitch of a letter sounds, emphasize syllables, indicate stress, mark a letter as long or heavy, create independent letters distinct from their diacritic-less versions, and more. In the default English keyboard, you'll find composite characters using accents such as acute (á, ó, Ú), circumflex (Â, ê, î), grave (Ò, ù, Í), and tilde (ã, Ñ, õ) dots such as umlaut (Ö, ü), and other diacritics such as macron (ā, Ā), overring (å, Å), and slash (ø, Ø). Keyboards in other languages will have their own sets of hidden characters. The characters uncovered here are found in the English (US) keyboard on iOS 15 and iOS 16, as well as on iOS 17, but you'll also find most of them in older iOS versions too, as well as on iPadOS. These special composite characters can include accents, dots, and other diacritics, and you'll even see some strange typographical characters like the section sign, inverted marks, and per mille symbol. Almost 190 secret characters are hiding behind your iPhone's default keyboard, and I'm not talking about what you see after tapping the "123" or "#+=" keys.
