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A dead key is a key on a typewriter or a computer keyboard that produces no output when it is pressed, but modifies the output of the next key pressed after it. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Combining diacritical marks are Unicode characters that are intended to modify other characters (see Diacritic). ... This Smith Premier typewriter, purchased around the end of the 19th century, was found abandoned in the Bodie ghost town. ... A computer keyboard is a peripheral modeled after the typewriter keyboard. ... // Information processing In information processing, output is the process of transmitting information by an object (verb usage). ...

Usage

Dead keys are commonly used to generate letters with accents (diacritics), because that way one does not need one key for each possible combination of letter and accent, but only one key for each accent (the dead key) plus the usual letter keys. A diacritical mark or diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a words pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ...

For example, if a keyboard has a dead key "´", the French character e accent aigu (é) can be generated by pressing first "´", then "e".

By construction, this has no restrictions on a typewriter, so you could accentuate an "f" for example.

In many text processing programs, dead keys are typed using the Ctrl key with the punctuation mark that looks most like the accent.

With the advent of Unicode character encoding it is possible to combine any available diacritical mark with any other character. The "combining diacritical marks" can be found in Unicode space U+0300 – U+036F (see http://www.decodeunicode.org/index.php?nodeId=70007&page=1&lang=1 for a list). For example, you can combine ̃ (U+0303 Combining Tilde) with p so you get p̃, whether this makes sense or not. Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...

More exotically, you can combine ̐ (U+0310 Combining Candrabindu) with ∞ so you get ∞̐.

Old computer systems such as the MSX often had a special ‘dead key’, which in combination with the Ctrl and Shift keys could add the accents ´, `, ˆ and ¨ to vowels that were typed subsequently. MSX official logo Sony MSX 1, Model HitBit-10-P MSX is the name of a standard for home computers in the 1980s. ...

See also

• compose key