Remove Accents & Diacritics
This tool strips diacritics from text by decomposing each letter into its base character plus its combining marks and then discarding the marks, so é becomes e and ñ becomes n across every alphabet that uses them. Some letters cannot be handled that way at all: ß, æ, œ, ø, ł, đ and þ are distinct letters rather than accented ones, with no base form to fall back to, so a decomposition-only tool leaves them untouched. Those are transliterated to their conventional equivalents instead — ß to ss, æ to ae, ø to o — which is what makes the output genuinely ASCII rather than almost-ASCII.
How it works
Strips diacritics by decomposing each letter into its base plus its combining marks and then dropping the marks, so é becomes e and ñ becomes n across every alphabet that uses them.
Some letters have no base form to fall back to — ß, æ, ø, ł, đ and þ are distinct letters rather than accented ones. Those are transliterated to their conventional equivalents instead, which decomposition alone cannot do.
Everything runs in your browser — nothing you paste is sent to a server.
Useful for slugs, filenames and search keys that must be plain ASCII.
How decomposition works
Unicode can store an accented letter two ways: as a single character, or as a base letter followed by a combining mark. Normalising to the decomposed form (NFD) guarantees the second, at which point the marks can simply be deleted and the remainder recomposed.
Because this operates on Unicode categories rather than a lookup table, it handles Vietnamese, Czech, Turkish, Polish, Greek and every other alphabet without a per-language list.
The letters decomposition cannot reach
A handful of characters have no accented base to strip:
| Letter | Becomes | Why |
|---|---|---|
| ß | ss | A ligature of two letters, not an accented s |
| æ Æ | ae AE | A separate letter in Danish and Norwegian |
| ø Ø | o O | A distinct letter with a stroke, not a diacritic |
| ł Ł | l L | Polish stroked l, a letter in its own right |
| þ ð | th d | Icelandic letters with no Latin base |
A caution about meaning
Accents are not decoration. Removing them can merge words that are genuinely different, so this belongs in the pipeline that builds slugs, filenames and search keys — not in the copy a reader will see.
Frequently asked questions
How do I remove accents from text?
Paste your text into the left panel. The unaccented version appears on the right immediately.
How does it work?
Each accented letter is decomposed into a base letter plus its combining marks; the marks are then deleted and the text recomposed. This works for every alphabet, not just Western European ones.
What about ß, æ and ø?
Those are separate letters rather than accented ones, so decomposition leaves them alone. They are transliterated instead — ß to ss, æ to ae, ø to o — which is the conventional equivalent in each case.
Why would I want plain ASCII?
URL slugs, filenames, database keys and search indexes are often ASCII-only or match unreliably against accented input. Stripping accents makes them behave predictably.
Does it change the meaning of the text?
It can. In French résumé and resume are different words, and in Turkish the dotless ı is a distinct letter. Use this for keys and identifiers rather than for prose you intend people to read.
Is anything uploaded?
No. Everything runs in your browser.
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