Remove Accents From Text: Free Online Accent Remover
To remove accents, replace each accented letter with its plain base: é becomes e, ñ becomes n and ø becomes o. This accent remover does that in your browser, so the text never leaves your device. Letters that carry no mark, such as ß and æ, stay unless you ask for plain ASCII.
Letters with no mark, such as ß and æ, stay as they are.
ß becomes ss and æ becomes ae, for systems that take a to z only.
Small letters and hyphens.
Which letters have no accent to remove?
Letters such as ß and æ carry no mark, so the first box leaves them alone. The Plain ASCII box spells them the way the Unicode CLDR Latin-ASCII transform does.
| Letter | Plain ASCII |
|---|---|
| ß | ss |
| æ | ae |
| ð | d |
| þ | th |
| ı | i |
| ŋ | n |
| œ | oe |
When is it worth removing accents?
Remove accents when a system cannot take the letter or mangles it, and keep them everywhere else. An accent remover earns its place in three cases:
- File names and links. RFC 3986 allows only a small set of plain characters in a URL, so é travels as %C3%A9. A file called résumé.pdf can arrive with an address that nobody can read aloud. The third box gives resume, ready for a name or a link.
- Old forms and exports. A sign-up form or a spreadsheet import that accepts only a to z rejects Müller. The second box gives Muller for that one field, while your name stays Müller everywhere else.
- Sorting and matching. Comparing two lists gets easier when both are stripped first, though it merges letters that a language keeps apart, as the diacritics guide shows.
When should the accents stay?
Whenever a person is going to read the text. An accent is part of the spelling, and in many languages it changes the word. Spanish año means year and ano means anus. FundéuRAE (opens in a new tab) treats a missing accent as a spelling mistake, capitals included. Names deserve the same care, because Müller and Muller may be two different families. So strip a copy for the machine and keep the original for the page.
If you need the letters back rather than gone, the copy pad has every one of them, and the Spanish accent guide works out which words take a mark.
How do you remove diacritics in code?
To remove diacritics in code, decompose the text and then delete the combining marks. Unicode's NFD form (opens in a new tab) turns é into e plus U+0301, and the second part can then go. In JavaScript, using normalize (opens in a new tab):
text.normalize('NFD').replace(/\p{M}/gu, '')
In Python, with unicodedata (opens in a new tab):
import unicodedata
''.join(c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text) if not unicodedata.combining(c))
We ran that strip over the 252 small letters with a mark in AccentPad's catalogue when this page was built (Node.js v26.0.0, ICU 78.3, CLDR 48.0). 247 came out as a plain letter from a to z. 5 came out unchanged: đ, ħ, ł, ø and ŧ. Their mark is drawn into the letter, so there is nothing to strip.
Letters such as ø, ł and đ are the gap: their stroke is not a combining mark. So a script that must handle them needs its own table, or a library built on the Latin-ASCII transform (opens in a new tab).
Frequently asked questions
Does this tool send my text anywhere?
No. The letters are replaced by code running in your own browser, and the page makes no request with your text. AccentPad sets no cookies and loads no analytics script.
Can removing accents change what a word means?
Yes. Spanish año means year, while ano means anus, and FundéuRAE counts a dropped accent as a spelling mistake even on a capital. Keep the marks in anything people read, and strip them only where a system cannot take them.
Why does a simple script leave ø and ł in place?
Because they have no separate mark. Unicode decomposes é into e plus a combining accent, so deleting combining marks works on it. The stroke in ø and ł is part of the letter, so that same step returns them unchanged. This tool reads the base letter from its facts instead.
Does the accent remover keep capitals?
Yes. É becomes E, Ñ becomes N and Ø becomes O, and every other character stays where it was: digits, punctuation, spaces and other alphabets. Only the box for file names and links turns everything into small letters.