Accented letters are a pleasure to read and a pain to process. A search box that does not know “resume” and “résumé” are the same word, a file name that arrives as caf?.txt after an upload, a legacy database that stores only plain ASCII: all of these want the accent gone. This tool replaces accented letters with their plain English equivalents and leaves everything else alone.
Type or paste text and the cleaned version appears straight away. “Crème brûlée” becomes “Creme brulee”, “piñata” becomes “pinata”, and “Zoë” becomes “Zoe”.
How it works, and why it is not just deletion
Under the hood, every accented letter can be written as a plain letter followed by an invisible combining mark. The tool splits the text apart that way, drops the marks, and puts it back together. That is why it can handle thousands of letters without a lookup table.
A handful of letters are not accented versions of anything and have to be expanded by name: ß becomes ss, æ becomes ae, œ becomes oe, ø becomes o, đ becomes d, ł becomes l, and þ becomes th. Capital forms are handled the same way, so “Æsir” becomes “AEsir” and “Straße” becomes “Strasse”.
What it leaves alone
Letters in Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew and the Asian scripts are untouched. There is no plain-Latin equivalent for them, and this tool does not transliterate. The Turkish dotless ı is also left as it is.
It also does not change punctuation, spacing or case.
Honest warnings
Removing accents can change meaning. In Spanish, “año” (year) becomes “ano”, which means something quite different. In French, “sûr” (sure) and “sur” (on) merge. German readers may still want “ü” written as “ue” rather than “u”, and this tool will give “u”. For names, only strip accents where a system forces you to; the owner of the name will probably notice.
Related jobs
For URLs, the slug generator strips accents and also lowercases and swaps spaces for hyphens, and our guide to SEO-friendly URLs explains why that matters. If you want everything that is not a basic character gone, not only accents, use remove special characters with the ASCII setting. And if you are curious what a letter is really made from, the Unicode converter lists each code point.
Search, databases and local conventions
Many databases and search engines can match without regard to accents when you ask them to, using an accent-insensitive collation or a normalising step, so you do not always need to alter stored text. Where you do convert, the right replacement depends on the language. German often writes ü as “ue”, ö as “oe” and ä as “ae”, while this tool simply drops the mark to give u, o and a. Danish and Norwegian write å as “aa” in older spellings, and ø as “o” or “oe”. When names are involved, such as on a passport or a ticket, follow the rule that the issuing organisation uses.