How to Access Hidden Characters on Your IPhone’s Keyboard
The iPhone keyboard has a hidden superpower – under the usual letters, numbers and symbols, there is a treasure trove of less common, but still useful symbols. The next time you want to tell someone, for example, how hot or cold it is, you don’t need to type in “degrees” or do a Google search for the degree symbol. You can press and hold the 0 (zero) key on your iPhone keyboard and quickly slide your finger over to the degree symbol, as shown in the picture above.
Key combination with a long press also allows you to enter characters with diacritical marks from the iPhone keyboard. Likewise, if you find yourself mentioning different currencies in the same conversation, press and hold the currency symbol next to the closed parenthesis key. This will show you a few additional currencies (€, £, ¥, ₩, and ₽) as well as the US dollar (if it’s not the default currency for your region). And there are other useful symbols hidden inside the keyboard that you probably don’t even know about.
Here is a list of the keys you can long press to reveal the hidden characters underneath:
- ? shows an inverted question mark (¿)
- … (dot key) shows ellipsis (…)
- / (forward slash) shows a backslash (\)
- ‘ (single quote) can be held down to quickly enter smart quotes
- “ (Double quotes) shows smart double quotes as well as forward (“) and rewind (“) characters.
- ! (exclamation mark) allows you to see an inverted exclamation mark (¡)
- = (equal) shows the inequality signs (≠) and is approximately equal to (≈)
- & (ampersand) shows the section sign, also known as double S (§)
- % (percentage) allows you to enter parts per thousand characters (‰)
- – (hyphen) indicates a pair of em dashes (- and -) and a marker icon (•)
If you still don’t have the easily accessible characters you’re looking for, you can always use iPhone’s built-in text replacement feature. Go to Settings> General> Keyboard> Text Replacement and tap the + sign in the upper right corner to add shortcuts to commonly used fancy characters.
For example, you can add a trademark symbol (™) next to Phrase and make it a shortcut . This way, whenever you type tm on the iPhone keyboard, it will automatically add the ™ character.