Russian Letters with Accents + 10 Ways to Type Them

How to write accent marks over Russian letters?

Need to write Russian letters with accents?

For a quick solution, just copy-paste them from here:

А́ Е́ И́ О́ У́ Ы́ Э́ Ю́ Я́

á é и́ ó у́ ы́ э́ я́ ю́

If you type a lot in Russian and absolutely need to put accent marks over Russian letters, you may want to seek a long-term solution. The issue is not easy, though. There are many ways but not each of them fits your IT skills, computer settings, and personal preferences.

Related: Russian Alphabet & Russian Pronunciation 

Why put accents in Russian words?

First and foremost, you won’t normally see accents typed over Russian text. In printed and handwritten Russian texts the accents are omitted.

The main reason you might see an accent placed is for educational purposes, that is, you will only see accents in dictionaries or textbooks for learning Russian either as a second language or as a native language.

There is another reason for placing an accent over a letter in Russian: this is when the accented word has a spell alike (read more about Homonyms in Russian in this post) and the difference in meaning is expressed through the accent. For example:

замо́к [za-mók] – lock
за́мок [zá-mak] – castle

It’s worth mentioning that accents are fundamental in Russian, wrongly placed accents sound weird, to say the least. And sometimes accents can even change the whole meaning of a word.

How to pronounce and read Russian words

Just remember:

• one accent per word
• always falls on a vowel
• accented vowels are pronounced more intensely and do not change their sound in pronunciation
• letter Ё, if present in the word, is always accented (Unfortunately, Russians prefer to replace the written Ё by E for the sake of speed. Tip: if you doubt whether you should read Ё or E, it’s safer to assume it’s E, as Ё is the least used letter in the Cyrillic alphabet)
• Unlike languages with fixed accent, e.g. Slovak or French, Russian language has no rules as to where the accent should fall, that is why you need to check it in the dictionaries and learn by heart

How to type Russian letters with accents while typing on PC or Mac?

There are several tools online that can help you with the Russian accent marks.

1. morpher.ru Copy paste your text, enter it in the field, hit the button <расставить ударения>, the website will put all the accents in the text you entered. Attention though: if a word can have different accents (remember, different meanings for every accent!), this tool will offer you all of them.
2. Ilya Birman’s layout (allows to enter characters usually unavailable on a keyboard, downloadable for MacOS and Windows).
3. In Android, use Gboard keyboard, holding a letter reveals it’s accented version. Example: а́ е́ и́ о́ у́ ы́ я́.
4. Use Unicode Character ‘COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT’ (U+0301)  after the letter you need to accent. If you have Windows and a full-size keyboard, you may also hit Alt and type it’s code 0301 on the keyboard that looks like a calculator or 769 (depending on the coding you use).
5. Copy this   ́ sign and add it after whatever vowel is stressed.
6. You may also find already accented letters in the “Symbols” table in Microsoft Word (Attention, not all versions have it!)
7. For MacOS: Press and hold a key until its alternate characters appear, then click or type the number under the character that you want to use.       – If no additional characters are available for the key that you’re holding, the accent menu doesn’t appear. Source: Apple Support.  Attention: only valid for Latin characters, so you could use this solution for á ó é
8. Another solution is using a dropbox file. Download and put the .keylayout file in Library/Keyboard Layouts, logout/login, go to system prefs/keyboard/input sources and use the plus and add buttons to add the keyboard, then select it in the flag menu at the top right of the screen. (If the downloaded file ends in .keylayout.txt, delete the .txt part from the name). Also, you could make shortcuts in system prefs/keyboard/text/symbol and text substitution for the accented versions of the letters.
9. And finally, my preferred solution for adding stress marks to Russian letters within a text is RussianGram.com  RussianGram helps you read and understand Russian by automatically adding stress marks and dots above the letter Ё. Just copy and paste your Russian text into the field and click Annotate. There is even a browser extension from the Google Chrome store to put stress marks on all web pages.
10. No time to use any external resources? Just copy-paste Russian letters with accents from here:

á é и́ ó у́ ы́ э́ я́ ю́ А́ Е́ И́ О́ У́ Ы́ Э́ Ю́ Я́

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Russian Grammar & Phrasebook

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