What ⌥ means
Hold the Option key while pressing the rest. Mac menus and shortcut guides use ⌥ as shorthand for the key's name, the same way ⌘ stands for Command. Option is the Mac's alternate-action modifier: it reveals alternate menu commands, extra click actions and characters that have no key of their own.
The key goes back to Apple's Lisa computer: developers interviewed in 1983 described an Extended Character option key for reaching extra character sets. Its job later widened to alternate commands. The switch-like drawing suggests a branching path, though Apple never published an official reason for the design; Unicode files it among keyboard symbols linked to the ISO 9995-7 keyboard-symbol standard.
How do I type accents with Option?
Press Option with a dead key, then the letter. With the ABC layout, Option-N then A gives ã. A dead key types nothing until the next letter arrives. Which characters Option reaches depends on your keyboard layout; Keyboard Viewer shows them while you hold Option or Shift-Option.
Technical and instructional: it lives in menus, shortcut guides and keyboard references.
Don't confuse it with
3Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
2Why does ⌥ look different in different fonts?
Font drawing. It is a plain text character, so each font draws its own version; the shape shifts, the meaning doesn't.
What order do Mac shortcut symbols go in?
⌃ Control, ⌥ Option, ⇧ Shift, ⌘ Command. Apple's menus list modifiers in that order before the main key, so ⌥⌘Esc rather than ⌘⌥Esc.
How to type ⌥
⌥\2325Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.