Letters With a Grave Accent: Copy, Type and Use Them

The grave accent ( ` ) is a short line slanting down to the right above a letter, as in à, è, ì, ò, ù. Click any letter above to copy it, or type à with Alt 0224 on Windows and Option + `, then a on a Mac.

It is the mirror image of the acute accent and is most common in French, Italian, Portuguese and Catalan. Below are the keys for every grave letter and what the mark means in each language.

How to type grave accent letters

Vowels with a grave accent

The grave key is the top-left key under Esc on US keyboards, sharing a key with the tilde. Alt codes need the number pad with Num Lock on.

Other letters with a grave accent

These have no Windows Alt code, no Mac Option shortcut and no Word Ctrl shortcut. In Word, type the hex code and press Alt + X. Elsewhere, copy them from the grid above or use Win + . (period) on Windows and the Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) on a Mac.

With the US International keyboard

On Windows or a Chromebook with US International, press the grave key, release, then the vowel: ` then a gives à. Press the grave key then Space to type the plain symbol. See our US International keyboard guide.

What the grave accent does in each language

French

French uses three grave letters. è gives an open e, as in père, mère and très. à and ù do not change the sound; they tell apart words that are otherwise spelled the same:

• a (has) vs à (to, at)
• ou (or) vs où (where)
• la (the) vs là (there)

The word où is the only French word with ù. Our page on French accent marks shows how the grave fits with the acute, circumflex and cedilla.

Italian

Italian writes the grave on a stressed vowel at the end of a word: città, perciò, più, università. It also separates è (is) from e (and).

Standard Italian uses the acute for a closed e (perché) and the grave for an open e (caffè, è). Most Italian keyboards have dedicated keys for both. See Italian accent letters.

Portuguese: the crase

In Portuguese the grave has one job. It shows that the preposition a has merged with the article a (or with words starting with a, like aquele). This merge is called crase, and many Portuguese speakers call the mark itself by that name.

"Vou à praia" means "I am going to the beach": a (to) plus a (the). For the rest of the Portuguese marks, see Portuguese accent letters.

Catalan

Catalan uses à, è and ò for open stressed vowels and é, í, ó and ú (acute) for closed ones. That is why you see both cafè and també.

Vietnamese

Vietnamese has six tones, and the grave marks the huyền tone, a low falling pitch. It can sit on any vowel, including y (ỳ), and combine with other marks on the same letter, as in ầ or ừ. Our Vietnamese accent letters page covers the full system.

Other uses

Scottish Gaelic marks long vowels with a grave only. Welsh uses it rarely, mostly in loanwords, which is where ẁ and ỳ come from. Yoruba and pinyin put it on n (ǹ) to mark a low or falling tone.

A short history

The grave accent comes from Ancient Greek, where the bareia ("heavy") marked a lower pitch. Latin writers translated the name as gravis, meaning "heavy" or "low", which is where the English word "grave" comes from.

Greek stopped needing the mark after its spelling reform in 1982, which reduced the old system to a single stress mark. The Western European languages kept it and gave it the jobs shown above.

Unicode and the combining grave

Each letter in the grid is a single precomposed character, such as U+00E0 for à. Use those for normal text.

Unicode also has a combining grave accent, U+0300, which attaches to the letter before it. Use it only when no precomposed letter exists.

The key on your keyboard types a different character: the spacing grave accent, U+0060, often called the backtick. Programmers use it for code formatting and in shell commands. It is not a substitute for à in text.

The grave has a mirror twin: the acute accent, which slants up to the right.