à / ã (A With a Tilde): How to Type, Copy, and Use It

ã is a lowercase a with a tilde, the small wave on top. Its capital is Ã. It’s above all a Portuguese letter, marking a nasal vowel, the sound at the heart of São Paulo. The capital à also has a second, accidental life as the calling card of a common text glitch.

If you just need the character, copy ã or à from the grid below, along with its HTML entity or URL code.

Below you’ll find how to type ã on every device, what the Portuguese nasal actually sounds like, why stray à characters show up in broken text, and how ã behaves in links and code.

In a hurry?

• Copy it: click ã or à in the grid below.
• On Windows: hold Alt and type 0227 for ã (0195 for Ã).
• On a Mac: press Option + n, then press a.
• On a phone: press and hold the a key, then slide to ã.
• In a URL ã is written %C3%A3; in HTML it’s ã.

Copy and paste ã

The two characters, with every code you’re likely to need in one row. Use the grid above to copy with a click; this table is the reference.

Character	Name	Unicode	Windows	Mac	HTML
ã	a with tilde	U+00E3	Alt + 0227	Option + n, a	ã
Ã	A with tilde	U+00C3	Alt + 0195	Option + n, Shift + A	Ã

How to type ã on any device

ã sits in the old Latin range, so it’s easy to reach almost everywhere.

Windows

Turn on Num Lock, hold Alt, and type 0227 on the numeric keypad for ã, or 0195 for Ã. The top-row numbers won’t work; it has to be the keypad.

For regular use, switch to the US-International layout and type a tilde (~) then a. You can also press Windows + . and pick ã from the symbol panel, or add the Portuguese keyboard if you write the language often.

Mac

Press Option + n together and let go; nothing shows yet. Press a and ã appears. For the capital, it’s Option + n, then Shift + A. Holding the a key down also brings up a menu with ã on it.

iPhone and Android

Press and hold the a key on the on-screen keyboard, then slide onto ã and lift your finger. Nothing to set up, and it works the same in nearly every app.

Microsoft Word

Press Ctrl + Shift + ~ (the tilde key), let go, then press a. Add Shift on the a for Ã. The Windows Alt code works here too.

Linux

Press Ctrl + Shift + U, type 00e3, then press Enter. With a Compose key, it’s Compose, then ~, then a.

Excel and Google Sheets

Use the Alt code on the keypad, or the UNICHAR formula: =UNICHAR(227) returns ã and =UNICHAR(195) returns Ã. The same works in Google Sheets.

The Portuguese nasal: how ã sounds

In Portuguese, the tilde on ã marks a nasal vowel, an a sent partly through the nose. It’s the sound at the centre of São Paulo, pão (“bread”), and mãe (“mother”).

The famous pairing is ão, a nasal diphthong that lands somewhere near “owng” for an English ear, so São is roughly “sowng” and pão is “powng.” There’s no clean English equivalent, which is why the sound is one of the first things Portuguese learners practise. The tilde is doing real work: without it, pao isn’t a word.

Seeing “Ô everywhere? The encoding trap

If accented text on a page or in a file has turned into a scatter of Ã characters, you’ve hit the most common encoding bug there is, and the capital à is its calling card.

Here’s why. When text is saved as UTF-8 but read as the older Latin-1, each accented letter splits into two visible characters, and the first is almost always Ã. So á becomes á, é becomes é, ç becomes ç, and ñ becomes ñ. The à isn’t a real a with a tilde; it’s the first byte of a UTF-8 character being shown on its own.

The fix is to make the whole chain agree on UTF-8: the file, the database, and the page’s charset. Once everything reads UTF-8, the à clusters collapse back into the letters they were meant to be. On a website, the culprit is usually a missing <meta charset="utf-8"> tag or a database column stored in the wrong encoding.

ã vs ñ: the tilde on a and on n

The same little wave sits on both ã and ñ, but it does different jobs. On the a it’s a Portuguese nasal vowel. On the n it makes the Spanish ñ, the “ny” sound in español.

They share a mark and even a name, since Spanish calls the whole symbol the tilde, but they aren’t the same letter or the same sound. For the n version and its own story, see the ñ guide.

Words with ã

A quick sense of where the letter turns up in Portuguese.

Word	Meaning	Note
São	saint	as in São Paulo
pão	bread	plural pães
mãe	mother
irmã	sister
não	no
maçã	apple	also carries a cedilla
coração	heart	the -ção ending

You’ll also meet it in amanhã (“tomorrow”), manhã (“morning”), and the long list of nouns ending in -ção, like ação and informação. In Vietnamese the same ã marks a tone rather than a nasal vowel.

ã in web addresses, URLs, and email

You can use ã in a domain name. It’s stored as a Punycode address beginning with xn--, which the browser turns back into ã for display, so a Brazilian or Portuguese domain can look like a run of random letters in its raw form.

Inside a URL path or query, ã is percent-encoded as %C3%A3, the two UTF-8 bytes (0xC3 and 0xA3) for the character. The capital à is %C3%83. A link with %C3%A3 in it has an ã inside.

Email is more cautious. An address can carry ã through the same system, but many servers still stumble over non-ASCII addresses, so it’s safest to keep ã out of an email address unless both ends support it.

ã in code and passwords

In code, ã is an ordinary Unicode character. Just watch the encoding, as above: a UTF-8 file read as Latin-1 is what turns ã into ã. Keep everything UTF-8 and it behaves.

Passwords are the place to be careful. A ã in a password can lock you out on another device, because a different keyboard or login form may encode it differently and produce different bytes. For a password you’ll type across systems, plain ASCII is safer.

When you want ã in code, the escapes help: \u00e3 in JavaScript, Java, JSON, and Python, and ã or ã in HTML.

Copy-paste HTML codes

Everything you need for the web and for links, in one place. Click a cell and copy.

Character	Named entity	Numeric entity	URL (percent) code
ã	ã	ã	%C3%A3
Ã	Ã	Ã	%C3%83

In a CSS content value, use the escaped code point \00e3. Serve the page as UTF-8 so the character holds. For the tilde on n, see the ñ guide; for the rest of the a family and every other mark, see the full letters-with-accents list.

Troubleshooting

“My ã shows up as ã or a box.”

The text was saved as UTF-8 but is being read as an older encoding like Latin-1. Set the file or page to UTF-8 and the ã returns. See the encoding section above for the full story on why à appears.

“Alt + 0227 just beeps or types nothing.”

Num Lock is off, you’re using the top-row numbers, or the laptop has no keypad. Turn Num Lock on and use the keypad. No keypad? Use the copy grid, the US-International layout, or Windows + .

“I get a floating tilde, like ~a, or an ñ.”

On the Mac and US-International, the tilde and the a have to be pressed one straight after the other, with nothing in between. Option + n loads the tilde; then press a, not n.

“A password with ã won’t log me in elsewhere.”

Different keyboards and login forms can encode ã differently, so the bytes may not match what you first set. For a password you’ll type on many devices, stick to plain ASCII.

FAQ

How do I type ã?

On Windows, Alt + 0227 (Alt + 0195 for Ã). On a Mac, Option + n then a. On a phone, long-press the a key. Or click it in the grid above.

How is ã pronounced?

In Portuguese it’s a nasal a, sent partly through the nose. In the common ão pairing it sounds close to “owng,” as in São Paulo and pão. It’s not two separate vowels.

Why do I keep seeing à in my text?

It’s an encoding mismatch: UTF-8 text read as Latin-1 shows each accented letter as à plus another character, so á looks like á. Set everything to UTF-8 and the à disappears.

What’s the difference between ã and ñ?

The base letter. ã is a with a tilde, a Portuguese nasal vowel; ñ is n with a tilde, the Spanish “ny” sound. Same mark, different letters and sounds.

How do I write ã in a URL or HTML?

In a URL, ã is %C3%A3 (Ã is %C3%83), and domains store it as Punycode beginning with xn--. In HTML, use ã or ã.