Old English Keyboard Guide (macOS)

It is not necessary to download any special keyboard to enter Old English (Anglo-Saxon) on macOS.

The following uses the ABC - Extended Input Source which includes the extra characters here and can still be used as your everyday keyboard for English. It’s also usable for Old Norse.

In the table below, ⌥ is the option key, so ⌥-a means hold down the option key and press a.

Note that the dead key and hold-to-select-alt methods produce single, precomposed characters whereas the combining character method produces two separate characters: the base plus a combining diacritic. This should be indistinguishable in display but may behave differently in text editors or when processing.

	single characters	dead key method	combining character method	hold-to-select-alt method
ā		⌥-a a	a ⌥-A	hold a press 8
ē		⌥-a e	e ⌥-A	hold e press 2
ī		⌥-a i	i ⌥-A	hold i press 3
ō		⌥-a o	o ⌥-A	hold o press 4
ū		⌥-a u	u ⌥-A	hold u press 4
ȳ		⌥-a y	y ⌥-A
æ	⌥-'			hold a press 5
ǣ		⌥-a ⌥-'	⌥-' ⌥-A
þ	⌥-t
ð	⌥-d
ċ		⌥-w c	c ⌥-W
ġ		⌥-w g	g ⌥-W
ƿ		⌥-: w
ȝ		⌥-: y
⁊		⌥-: 7

Many thanks to Christian Carey for corrections and additions to this page.