Typing Paris Métro station names without accents

Paris station names are French, and many carry accents: Châtelet, Bibliothèque François Mitterrand, Gare de l'Est, Montparnasse - Bienvenüe. A player on an English or Korean keyboard should not have to hunt for those keys, so HelloSubway accepts the plain letter wherever the name has an accent. Châtelet can be typed Chatelet, and Bienvenüe can be typed Bienvenue. If you are on a French AZERTY keyboard and type the accented letter, that is accepted too.

What is flexible and what is not

Only two things are flexible: accents, and upper or lower case. Everything else is typed as it appears on the nameplate. In our data, 93 of the 309 typed stations have a hyphen, and 13 have an apostrophe, such as Gare d'Austerlitz, Porte d'Orléans and Place d'Italie. Those characters are part of the name, so you press them. Names with a spaced hyphen, like Strasbourg - Saint-Denis, need both the spaces and the hyphen.

How a mistake is counted

A mistake is counted once, on the first key that leaves every accepted spelling. If you type Chatelot, the o is the mistake, and the rest of the word after it is not counted again. The wrong letter turns red so you can see where you went off, and you erase it with Backspace before going on. Typing speed counts the keys you actually press, so a plain e counts as one key, exactly like an é would.

Two settings that matter more than accents

The first is your input method. If you use a Korean or Japanese keyboard, switch it to the English layout before you start, because otherwise the keyboard types Hangul or kana and every key is a mistake. The second is the language choice at the start of a ride. For Paris it changes only the language of the landmark notes, English or French. The station names you type are the same either way.

The shortest and longest names

With accents ignored, Rome, Cité and Iéna take four keys, and Ségur, Duroc and Odéon take five. At the other extreme, Créteil - L'Échat (Hôpital Henri Mondor) takes 40 letters on Line 8. If you want to see how the lines compare, read the ranking of all 16 lines or start a ride from the Paris page.