Guide
Removing accents and diacritics without damaging other scripts
Accented letters are correct and important in names and text people read. But some systems still cannot handle them: old databases, airline and bank forms, file systems on certain servers, or search features that treat “Müller” and “Muller” as different words. Removing accents gives plain letters for those cases. Doing it properly takes more care than most quick converters apply.
How it works
Unicode can write an accented letter as a base letter followed by a combining accent. The tool splits each character into that form and drops the accents, so é becomes e, ñ becomes n, ç becomes c and ő becomes o. Vietnamese letters with two marks, such as ễ, lose both. Capitals stay capitals. The count below the result shows how many letters changed.
Letters that are not just accented
Some letters look accented but are letters of their own, so Unicode does not split them: German ß, Danish and Norwegian ø and æ, Polish ł, Croatian đ and Icelandic þ and ð. With the special-letter option they are written in their usual plain form: ss, o, ae, l, d, th and d. Without it, they are kept unchanged.
German umlauts
In German, ä, ö and ü are traditionally written ae, oe and ue when umlauts are unavailable, as in passports and email addresses: Müller becomes Mueller. The German option applies that rule. For search keys and sorting, the plain form (Muller) is more common, which is the default.
Other scripts are protected
Many writing systems use combining marks that are not accents. In Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and other Indic scripts, vowel signs are combining marks, and so are Thai tone marks. Removing them changes the word entirely. This tool only simplifies Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters and leaves every other script untouched. For Russian and Ukrainian, й, ё and ї are distinct letters; keep them with the Cyrillic option. Arabic short-vowel marks and Hebrew vowel points can be removed separately when you need unvocalised text.
Typical uses
Developers create ASCII search keys so that “cafe” finds “café”. Office teams prepare name lists for systems that reject accents, such as some payment and travel forms. Webmasters build plain file names and URLs from titles; the Slug Generator does that in one step. Data teams normalise text before matching records from different sources.
Keep the original
Removing accents can change meaning: in Spanish, año (year) and ano are different words, and in French, “pêche” and “péché” differ by their accents. Keep the accented original for anything people will read, and use the plain version only where a system requires it. The conversion runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
A worked example
The line “Crème brûlée, Łódź, Straße, Müller, Ελληνικά” becomes “Creme brulee, Lodz, Strasse, Muller, Ελληνικα” with the default options. With the German option it reads “Mueller”, and with special letters turned off, ł and ß stay as they are, giving “Łodz” and “Straße”. A line of Hindi or Thai text in the same input comes out exactly as it went in.
Related tools
Remove other marks with Remove Punctuation, change capitalisation with the Case Converter, or clean spacing with the Text Cleaner.
Checked against the current version of the Remove Accents on .