About Remove Accents
Remove Accents strips the diacritical marks from letters, turning an accented character into its plain Latin equivalent. It works by decomposing each character into a base letter plus its mark and then discarding the marks, which is why the transformation is systematic rather than a lookup table of individual letters.
That approach handles the common cases exactly: the accented vowels in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German, the cedilla, and the tilde all reduce to their base letters. The characters whose marks are not separable do not change, because there is nothing to decompose — a letter with a stroke through it or a slash remains as it was, since the modification is part of the letter itself rather than a combining mark.
The practical uses are searching and matching. Text that arrives from different systems with different accent conventions will not compare equal letter by letter, and normalising both sides removes that difference. The result is a plain-text approximation, so it is the wrong tool if you need the accented form preserved for display.
How to use Remove Accents
- 1 Paste the accented text.
- 2 Read the output, which uses plain Latin letters in place of the accented ones.
- 3 Check any characters that did not change, since some modified letters have no decomposable form.
Frequently asked questions
Why did some of my special characters stay the same?
Because only marks that can be separated from a base letter are removed. Letters where the modification is part of the character itself — the ones with a stroke or a slash, for example — cannot be decomposed, so they are returned unchanged.
Is the result suitable for display?
It is suitable for searching, matching and generating slugs or identifiers. For display you are better off keeping the original text, since the accented form is the correct spelling in the source language.
Does it handle non-Latin scripts?
It applies the same decomposition rule, but most non-Latin scripts do not carry the kind of combining accents this targets, so little changes. The transformation is aimed at Latin text with diacritics.
Free, online, and private
Free to use
Remove Accents is completely free. There is no account to create, no login, and no hidden charge or usage limit.
Runs online in your browser
It is a free online tool that runs entirely in your browser. Nothing to download or install — open the page and start using it right away.
Your data stays private
All processing happens locally on your device. Your input is never uploaded, stored, or tracked, so it never leaves your browser.
How Remove Accents behaves in detail
These are the specifics of this implementation — the exact ranges, defaults and fixed settings you are working with.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Method | Unicode NFD normalisation, then deletion of the combining marks in the U+0300–U+036F block |
| Precomposed input | handled — "Café" stored as one code point per letter is decomposed first and comes back as "Cafe" |
| Unmappable letters | letters whose mark is part of the character do not change — ø, đ, ł, æ, œ and ß have no combining mark to strip |
| Normalisation form | NFD only, not NFKD, so compatibility forms such as the fi ligature are left as they are |
| Update mode | live — recomputed on every keystroke |
Compiled from the implementation of this tool and checked against it by itoolnet.
What Remove Accents does not do
Knowing the edges of a tool saves more time than another list of its features. These are the cases where it will not do what you might expect.
- Letters that are not written as a base plus a combining mark survive untouched. ø, đ, ħ, ł, æ, œ and ß are single code points with no canonical decomposition, so "Søren" is returned as "Søren" and "Straße" as "Straße" rather than Soren and Strasse.
- Only the U+0300–U+036F block is removed and only after a canonical decomposition. A mark outside that range keeps its character, and anything needing a compatibility decomposition — the fi ligature, the fraction ½, full-width forms — is passed through unchanged because the normalisation step is NFD rather than NFKD.
- Nothing is reported back. The deleted marks are simply gone and no list tells you which characters were altered, so "Nguyễn" quietly becomes "Nguyen" with no indication that two diacritics were dropped or which vowels they sat on.
Tested and documented by itoolnet, the team that builds and maintains this site.