B with Accent: Every Way to Type It on Keyboard

There’s no single B with accent. The letter B takes three diacritics in Unicode: Ḃ (dot above), Ḅ (dot below), and Ḇ (line below), each in an uppercase and a lowercase form. None of them has a Windows Alt code. The quickest reliable route is in Word: type the hex code and press Alt+X, so 1E02 then Alt+X gives you Ḃ. Everywhere else, copy the glyph or use the app’s symbol picker.

So there are six characters to know, plus a couple of look-alikes that are actually separate letters rather than accented B. This guide gives you the exact keys and menu paths for every platform, then the codes for the web. If you just need the number, the table below has all six.

B with accent: full reference table

The code points run in order, capital then small: dot above at U+1E02 and U+1E03, dot below at U+1E04 and U+1E05, line below at U+1E06 and U+1E07. The decimal values 7682 to 7687 matter for spreadsheet formulas, covered below. There are no named HTML entities for these, so the numeric form is your only web option.

The three accents, and how case works

Three distinct marks sit on the same base letter. The dot above (Ḃ ḃ) puts a single point over the B. The dot below (Ḅ ḅ) puts it under. The line below (Ḇ ḇ) is a short horizontal underscore attached to the letter, not a separate underline character. Each mark exists as its own precomposed uppercase and lowercase pair, and the two cases sit on consecutive code points, so the capital is always the even number and the small letter is the next one up.

Two other characters get mistaken for accented B but are separate letters: Ɓ / ɓ (B with hook, U+0181 and U+0253) and Ƀ / ƀ (B with stroke, U+0243 and U+0180). The hook and the stroke change the letter’s identity in the alphabets that use them, rather than sitting on it as a diacritic. If your source text needs one of those, the same Word Alt+X trick works with their hex codes.

Type B with accent on Windows

Alt codes don’t reach this part of Unicode, so the numeric-keypad method that produces © or é does nothing here. Use Character Map instead.

1. Press Start, type charmap, and open Character Map.
2. Tick “Advanced view” at the bottom.
3. In “Group by,” choose Unicode Subrange, then pick Latin Extended Additional.
4. Click the character you want (for example Ḃ), then Select, then Copy.
5. Paste into your document.

If you type these often, a dedicated tool is faster than hunting the grid. The accent keyboard tool lets you click a letter and copy it straight out.

Type B with accent on Mac

Mac has no Alt codes and no Option shortcut for these letters. The Character Viewer handles them.

1. Press Control+Command+Space to open the Character Viewer.
2. Type “B with dot above” (or dot below, or line below) in the search box.
3. Double-click the result to drop it into your text field.

Add the ones you use to Favorites in the viewer so you don’t search twice.

Word, Outlook and OneNote: Alt+X

This is the fastest desktop method. Type the four-character hex code, then press Alt+X, and Word converts it in place.

1. Type 1E02 (or any code from the table).
2. With the cursor right after the code, press Alt+X.
3. The code flips to Ḃ. Press Alt+X again immediately to toggle back if you got the wrong one.

For repeat use, set up an AutoCorrect entry: File → Options → Proofing → AutoCorrect Options, then map something like b.dot to Ḃ. You can also use Insert → Symbol → More Symbols and filter the subset to Latin Extended Additional. That same Insert → Symbol dialog exists in PowerPoint and Excel, so the picker route carries across the Office apps. Alt+X does not: it works only in Word, Outlook, and OneNote.

Excel and Google Sheets: UNICHAR

Both spreadsheets build the character from its decimal code point with =UNICHAR(). Use the decimal values, not the hex: Ḃ is 7682, ḃ is 7683, Ḅ is 7684, ḅ is 7685, Ḇ is 7686, ḇ is 7687.

• Excel: put =UNICHAR(7682) in a cell for Ḃ. Insert → Symbol also works here.
• Google Sheets: use =UNICHAR(7682). Sheets has no Insert → Symbol menu at all, so a formula, a paste, or typing it elsewhere and copying in are your only routes. If you paste into a cell, press F2 to enter edit mode first.

Google Docs

1. Insert → Special characters.
2. Type “b dot above” in the search box, or draw the shape in the sketch panel.
3. Click the character to insert it.

Word’s Alt+X does nothing in Google Docs, so don’t reach for it here.

iPhone and Android

Long-pressing B on either keyboard gives you accented vowels’ worth of options for other letters, but not these B forms. There’s no built-in shortcut. Two ways round it:

• Copy once, paste as needed from a reference page or note.
• Make a text replacement so a short trigger expands to the letter. On iPhone: Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, add Ḃ with a phrase like bdot. On Android with Gboard: Settings → Personal dictionary, add the character with a shortcut.

Chromebook

ChromeOS has no Alt codes, and a USB numpad won’t add them, because the feature is Windows software rather than keypad hardware. Use the Unicode input shortcut.

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+U. An underlined u appears.
2. Type the hex code only, no U+ prefix, for example 1e02.
3. Press Enter or Space to confirm.

The symbol picker at Launcher+Shift+Space is another option, and newer Chromebooks have a dedicated Quick Insert key. Some web text fields swallow the Ctrl+Shift+U shortcut; if nothing appears, paste the character instead.

Notion, Slack, Discord and Canva

None of these has a keyboard shortcut for accented B. The reliable move in all four is paste. To make it permanent, Slack and Discord both support text replacement through your operating system’s settings rather than the app, so a trigger like :bdot won’t work but the OS-level expansion from the mobile section will. In Canva, paste into a text box and check the character survives, since a display font may not carry the glyph even when the text is correct.

HTML and CSS

There are no named entities for these letters, so use numeric references. Decimal or hex both work: Ḃ or Ḃ for Ḃ. In CSS, escape the code point in a content value as "\1E02". For web forms and URLs, see the normalization note below, since two visually identical inputs can fail to match.

Precomposed vs combining accents

Ḃ can exist as one code point (U+1E02, the precomposed form) or as two: a plain B followed by a combining dot above (U+0307). On screen they can look identical. Under the hood they are not, and that difference bites in real places.

• Search and find/replace often treat the one-character and two-character versions as different strings, so a search for one misses the other.
• Filenames and usernames can be rejected or silently altered by systems that only accept one normalization form.
• Copy/paste from some sources hands you the decomposed pair, which then looks fine but counts as two characters.

The fix is to normalize to NFC (composed) form, which collapses the pair back into the single precomposed character. Most editors and programming languages have an NFC function. When you type from the table above, you already get the precomposed form, so this only becomes an issue with pasted or imported text.

When B with accent won’t show up right

• You see a box (□) or a question mark. The font lacks the glyph. Latin Extended Additional isn’t in every typeface. Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, DejaVu Sans, and Charis SIL all cover these; switch the run of text to one of them.
• The dot below or line below gets clipped by a tight line height, so it looks like a smudge. Give the line a little more spacing, or pick a font that draws the mark clearly.
• You got the wrong mark. Dot above, dot below, and line below are easy to mix up in a picker. Check the Unicode name in the table rather than eyeballing a small preview.
• You typed Alt+1E02 and got nothing. Alt codes take decimal on a numeric keypad and don’t reach this range at all. Use Word’s Alt+X, Character Map, or UNICHAR instead.
• The letter breaks apart when pasted. That’s the combining form. Normalize to NFC as described above.

Where these letters are used

The dot-above B (Ḃ ḃ) appears in traditional Irish (Gaelic) typography, where an overdot marks lenition on a consonant. The dot-below and line-below forms (Ḅ ḅ, Ḇ ḇ) turn up in academic transliteration and romanization systems, where diacritics distinguish sounds a plain B can’t. If you’re setting one of those, the codes above are what you need.

Related accented letters

• A with an accent mark covers the vowel forms most people reach for first, and unlike B, several of them do have Alt codes.
• C with accents includes the cedilla ç and the caron č, both far more common in everyday text than accented B.
• D with an accent mark shares the dot-above and line-below pattern with B, so the methods carry straight over.
• E with accent is the vowel version of this same problem, with é, è, ê, and ë.
• F with accents sits next to B in the same Latin Extended Additional block and behaves the same way, with no Alt codes.

Related guides

• Browse all accented letter guides.
• The complete accented letters guide.