Dead key

A dead key is a key on a computer keyboard that produces no output when it is pressed, but modifies the output of the next key pressed after it.

Dead keys are commonly used to generate letters with accents (diacritics), because that way one does not need one key for each possible combination of letter and accent, but only one key for each accent (the dead key) plus the usual letter keys.

For example, if a keyboard has a dead key "'", the French character "e accent aigu" (é) can be generated by pressing first "'" , then "e".