How Do You Type Pinyin With Tone Marks?

This is a different question from how to type Chinese characters. That one is about the pinyin input method: you type nihao and pick 你好 from a candidate list, and the pinyin disappears. Here the pinyin is the output — for homework, a vocabulary list, a flashcard, a forum post, a name on a form, or a caption under a character. The two setups have almost nothing in common, which is why an IME guide never answers this.

Every method, at a glance

The fastest way on any device: type numbers, convert once

Write the tone as a digit straight after each syllable and fix the whole thing in one step at the end. wo3 xiang3 he1 cha2 becomes wǒ xiǎng hē chá. You never leave the keyboard you already have, it is identical on a phone and a laptop, and it is the only approach that does not care which operating system you are on.

Where the mark sits when a syllable has more than one vowel — why it is hǎo and not haǒ — is a separate rule, set out in Hanyu Pinyin Spelling Rules. A converter applies it for you, which is most of why people use one.

Windows

Windows ships nothing that types all four tone marks, and this surprises people who have already installed the Chinese language pack. The Microsoft Pinyin IME converts pinyin into characters — it is not a way to write marked pinyin. What you actually have:

• Alt+X in Word (and Outlook). Type the four-digit Unicode code point and press Alt+X immediately after it: 01CE then Alt+X becomes ǎ. Every code point is in the table below. This works nowhere else — not in a browser, not in Notepad.
• The US-International layout (Settings → Time & language → Language & region → Add a keyboard). Its dead keys give you á (apostrophe then the vowel) and à (backtick then the vowel) — the second and fourth tones only. There is no macron and no caron, so the first and third tones are still out of reach.
• A third-party layout. Free utilities such as PinyinTones install a keyboard where typing hao3 turns into hǎo as you go. Worth it if you type marked pinyin every day on the same machine; overkill for a homework sheet, and it is one more thing to install on a shared or work computer.
• Character Map (search for charmap) has every marked vowel under Latin Extended-A and Extended-B, one copy-paste at a time.

macOS — the one system that has this built in

Add ABC – Extended in System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → + → English. It behaves exactly like the normal US keyboard except that four Option combinations become dead keys: nothing appears when you press them, and the next vowel you type comes out marked.

The dead keys stack, which is how the toned ü is made: press the tone first, then Option+U, then u — Option+V, Option+U, u gives ǚ. If a combination produces nothing at all, you are still on the plain ABC layout rather than ABC – Extended; they look identical in the menu bar apart from the name.

iPhone and Android — where the third tone goes missing

Press and hold a vowel on the ordinary English keyboard and an accent strip pops up. You will find the macron (ā), the acute (á) and the grave (à) there on most keyboards. What is almost never there is the caron — ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ, the third tone — because it is a rare mark in the European languages those accent strips were designed for. Nothing in the settings adds it.

So on a phone you have two realistic options: type the tone numbers and convert them (nothing to install, works in any app), or install a dedicated pinyin keyboard from the app store. For a single character, holding the vowel and taking whichever of the three marks you need is still quicker than either.

Google Docs, Word and LibreOffice

Why so much pinyin is written hao3, nv3 and nu:3

The number convention is not a beginner's shortcut — it is how the machine-readable half of the Chinese-learning world is written, and recognising it saves a lot of confusion. A tone number goes immediately after its own syllable: ma1 is mā, ma2 is má, ma3 is mǎ, ma4 is mà, and the neutral tone is written ma5 or sometimes ma0.

ü is the interesting one. The letter v is not used anywhere in Mandarin pinyin, which leaves it free, so almost every input method and web form lets you type v and means ü: nv3 is nǚ and lv4 is lǜ. Dictionary files written before that settled — CC-CEDICT among them — use u: instead, so the same word appears as nu:3. Both are the same sound and a good converter takes either.

The reason all of this exists is plain: tone numbers are ASCII. They survive filenames, spreadsheet columns, database fields, search boxes, URLs and any form that mangles accented characters — which is most of them. Anywhere a file has to be read by a program rather than a person, pinyin is written with numbers, and someone has to turn it back into marks at the end. That last step is the converter.

Going the other way — stripping the marks off to get plain letters for a search box — is Pinyin Without Tones. And if what you have is Chinese characters rather than pinyin at all, the Chinese to Pinyin translator and the Pinyin Annotator are the pages for that.

Copy any tone mark — and its Windows code point

Tap a character to copy it. The code is what you type before Alt+X in Word.

Frequently Asked Questions