A dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a typewriter or computer keyboard that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a (complete) character by itself but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after. Thus, a dedicated key is not needed for each possible combination of a diacritic and a letter, but rather only one dead key for each diacritic is needed, in addition to the normal base letter keys.
For example, if a keyboard has a dead key for the grave accent (`), the French character à can be generated by first pressing ` and then A, whereas è can be generated by first pressing ` and then E. Usually, the diacritic in an isolated form can be generated with the dead key followed by space, so a plain grave accent can be typed by pressing ` and then Space.
Read more about Dead Key: Usage, Dead Keys On Various Keyboard Layouts
Famous quotes containing the words dead and/or key:
“she cannot understand
What she wants or why she wanders to that undiscovered land,
For the parties there are not at all the sort of thing she planned,
In the land where the dead dreams go.”
—Alfred Noyes (1880–1958)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)