Hawaiian Diacritical Marks and Other Special Characters

You can insert special characters into a web page by typing an ampersand, a number or letter sequence, and a semicolon.

These are the codes for rendering diacritical marks in Hawaiian words:

• ʻ   —   ʻokina or glottal stop
• Ā   —   Ā
• ā   —   ā
• Ē   —   Ē
• ē   —   ē
• Ī   —   Ī
• ī   —   ī
• Ō   —   Ō
• ō   —   ō
• Ū   —   Ū
• ū   —   ū

Other frequently used codes:

• &   —   ampersand (because the ampersand is an "escape character", this is the safest way to display an actual ampersand)
• –   —   n-width dash
• —   —   m-width dash
• ¢   —   ¢
•     —   non-breaking space (used between words you don't want separated at line breaks)

A Note on Accessibility: The ʻokina is known to throw off screen reading programs that read out text for blind people. To address this, University of Hawaiʻi Office of Communications recommends using the aria-label attribute within a span tag to supply the word (without diacrical marks) to the screen reader.

  <span aria-label="Hawaii">Hawai&#699;i</span>

Rev. Oct. 23, 2017
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