How To Remove Accents

What Is Remove Accents?

Remove Accents strips the diacritical marks from letters while keeping the base letter, so "café" becomes "cafe" and "naïve" becomes "naive". Case, spacing, and punctuation are untouched. This is how to convert accented text to plain ASCII: it turns accents to plain text and the result appears instantly as you type.

Why Plain ASCII Is Sometimes Required

Many systems still expect unaccented ASCII: legacy databases, strict import formats, file names, usernames, and some search indexes. Accented characters in those places can cause failed lookups, mojibake, or rejected records. Knowing how to strip diacritics before an import saves a batch of rejected rows: to remove diacritical marks and unaccent text is to make it compatible without retyping it by hand. Diacritical marks are the small signs added to a letter, such as the accent in é or the tilde in ñ.

How It Works

The tool applies Unicode normalization so each accented letter is decomposed into a base letter plus a separate combining mark, then removes those combining marks to strip diacritics. Unicode normalization is the standard step that splits a single accented character into its base and its mark. "Crème Brûlée" becomes "Creme Brulee" with the capitalisation and spacing preserved.

This tool is free and runs online entirely in your browser. Your text stays on your device, protecting your privacy: nothing is uploaded to a server, and results appear instantly.

Examples

A French word. For example, input: café. Output: cafe. The base letters stay, only the accent is dropped.

A name for a database. For example, Zoë Muñoz becomes Zoe Munoz, so an accented and unaccented entry match in a plain ASCII column.

A letter with no separable mark. For example, the German ß passes through unchanged, because it is a single letter rather than a base plus a combining mark.

Removing Accents vs Transliteration vs Slugifying

Removing accents vs full transliteration is a question of scope. Removing accents only drops marks from letters that have them, so é becomes e while ß and ł, which carry no separable mark, stay put. It does not transliterate letters without a separable accent, so those pass through unchanged. Full transliteration maps every letter to an ASCII equivalent, turning ß into ss. Stripping accents vs slugifying is the next step up: slugifying strips accents and then lowercases and hyphenates the result into a URL. Use this tool to unaccent text and keep it readable, then slugify when you need a web-safe string.

Common Mistakes

Related tools: explore all text case and cleanup utilities in the Text Utilities collection.