ë

Latin character E with diaeresis

About this character

The character ë is known as Latin character E with diaeresis and carries the Unicode code point U+00EB, which is 235 in decimal. It belongs to the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080–U+00FF), which gathers the accented letters of Western European languages along with the punctuation and symbols inherited from ISO 8859-1.

In memory, ë takes 2 bytes in UTF-8 (0xC3 0xAB) and 1 in UTF-16 (0x00EB). That difference is why badly configured forms or databases garble this character: they assume one byte per character.

How to type ë

System What to do
Windows On Windows, hold Alt and type 235 on the numeric keypad. In Word or WordPad, type 00EB and press Alt + X to turn the code into the character.
macOS On a Mac using the ABC/US layout, ⌥ + U, then E produces this character directly.
Linux On Linux (GTK), type Ctrl + ⇧ + U, 00EB then press Enter.
HTML / Web In an HTML page, write ë. Use \00EB in CSS, \u00EB in JavaScript and \u00EB in Python.
On this site The simplest route is the Copy button above: the character goes straight to your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere.

Keyboards that include ë

This character is not on any common physical layout, so the Copy button above is the quickest way to get it into a document.

Codes and encodings

Property Value
Code pointU+00EB
Unicode blockLatin-1 Supplement (U+0080–U+00FF)
Decimal235
Hexadecimal0x00EB
Octal0353
Binary11101011
UTF-8 bytes0xC3 0xAB
UTF-16 units0x00EB
Named HTML entityë
Decimal HTML entityë
Hex HTML entityë
CSS escape\00EB
JavaScript escape\u00EB
Python escape\u00EB
URL encoding%C3%AB

Frequently asked questions

What is the Unicode code for ë?

Its code point is U+00EB, which is 235 in decimal and 0353 in octal. In HTML you can write it as ë or ë.

Why does ë show up as a box or a question mark?

An empty box means the font has no glyph for U+00EB. The character is still in the text: switching to a font that covers the block (Noto, DejaVu or Segoe UI Symbol) makes it appear.

Can I use ë in a filename, a URL or a password?

In a URL it must be encoded as %C3%AB. Modern filesystems accept it, though it is still risky when moving files between systems. For passwords, some forms reject non-ASCII characters outright.

Characters from the same block

ĕ ę ê é ē