Grave Accent (`): The Falling Stroke Over à, è and ù

What is a grave accent, and which way does it slope?

A grave accent is a short slanted stroke written over a vowel, as in à, è and ù. Its top sits on the left and it falls to the right. Priberam (opens in a new tab), the Portuguese dictionary, describes it as an oblique line drawn from left to right and from top to bottom. The acute of é runs the other way, so the two marks mirror each other over the same letter.

In Oxford's learner's dictionary (opens in a new tab) the accent is a headword of its own: a sign over a vowel that tells you how to say it, as on the e of French père. Oxford spells that headword /ɡrɑːv/, a different word from the grave of a cemetery.

The name means heavy. Wiktionary (opens in a new tab) traces the English word through Middle French to Latin gravis, heavy or important, and its entry for gravis (opens in a new tab) lists Ancient Greek barús, heavy, as a cognate.

Greek is where the pair began. Polytonic Greek sets the oxia, drawn as an acute, against the varia, drawn as a grave, as Unicode's chapter on European scripts (opens in a new tab) puts it. The Unicode character names file (opens in a new tab) keeps the Greek word too: U+0300 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT is also called Greek varia.

Each language that writes it has its own name. Wiktionary's list of translations (opens in a new tab) runs from accento grave in Italian and accent greu in Catalan to dấu huyền in Vietnamese and Gravis in German. English also uses the French one, accent grave (opens in a new tab), word order and all.

Grave or acute: why does Italian write perché and Catalan perquè?

Because each language assigns the two marks by its own sounds. Both words mean because, and both end in a stressed e. Italian hears a closed e there and writes the acute. Catalan hears an open e and writes the grave. The slope of the stroke tells a reader which vowel to say, so the same word looks wrong when the mark leans the wrong way.

Language	The grave goes on	The acute goes on	Words to compare	Rule from
Italian	the open è and ò, and any accented a, i or u	the closed é and ó	caffè, città; perché	Treccani
Catalan	à, the open è and the open ò	í, ú, and the closed é and ó	perquè, germà; església	IEC
French	è, the open e of près; à and ù only to tell words apart	é, the closed e of dé	près; dé	OQLF

Italian draws the line by sound. Treccani's dictionary (opens in a new tab) gives the acute to a closed e or o and the grave to an open e or o, and to a, i and u, which have no closed partner.

Wiktionary transcribes perché (opens in a new tab) as /perˈke/ and caffè (opens in a new tab) as /kafˈfɛ/, the open vowel. Treccani adds that some writers use a uniform grave and spell perchè. The Italian alphabet page lists the words that take each mark.

Catalan uses the same two marks but never puts a grave on i or u. The Institut d'Estudis Catalans (opens in a new tab) writes the grave on a, on the open e and on the open o: germà, matèria, història. The acute goes on i, u and the closed e and o: matí, públic, església, córrer. The Institute's own list of final-stressed words with è includes perquè and cafè.

The Catalan rule follows one way of speaking. The same orthography notes that the open e of central Catalan, the base for the grave, is often neutral in most of Balearic and closed across western Catalan. A speaker of western Catalan writes the grave of perquè over a closed e.

French gives the grave a sound only on e. Quebec's language office, the OQLF (opens in a new tab) says è stands for the vowel of près, against the é of dé and the e of de. It usually ends a written syllable, so the e of a word family can switch marks: fidèle beside fidélité. The e with accent page covers the 1990 reform that moved some é to è.

Which words does a grave accent tell apart?

Mostly short, common ones that would otherwise be spelled alike. In several languages the grave carries no sound at all in these words. It only tells the reader which of two words is meant.

Language	Without the mark	With the grave	What the mark adds	Source
French	a, has; la, the; ou, or	à, to; là, there; où, where	a different word, said the same way	OQLF
Italian	e, and	è, is	the verb, not the conjunction	Treccani, Wiktionary
Portuguese	a, to, or the	à, to the	two words merged into one	Priberam, Wiktionary
Vietnamese	ma, ghost	mà, but	a falling tone, the huyền	Wiktionary
English verse	learned	learnèd	one more syllable, read aloud	Wiktionary

French began with this job. According to the OQLF's note on the distinctive grave (opens in a new tab), in the 16th and 17th centuries the grave served only to separate grammatical words spelled alike, with no sound value. It still has none in those words: à, là, çà, déjà, dès and où. The French alphabet page lists the full set of pairs, and u with accent explains why ù lives in où alone.

Treccani makes the mark compulsory on a word stressed on its final vowel, such as carità and virtù. It is also required on some one-syllable words that would be mistaken for others without it, such as è, the verb, and the adverbs là and lì. Wiktionary's entry for è (opens in a new tab) gives the pair: è, is, as opposed to e, and.

Portuguese gives the grave one task: the crase. A crase, in Priberam's entry (opens in a new tab), is two vowel sounds fused into one. Wiktionary (opens in a new tab) spells out the case the accent marks: the preposition a, to, plus the article a, the. The fused à means to the, and it stands only before feminine words. The a with accent and Portuguese alphabet pages cover àquele and the accents the spelling reforms removed.

In Vietnamese the grave is a tone. Unicode's chapter 7 lists U+0300 among the characters to use for Vietnamese tone marks.

Wiktionary's entry for dấu huyền (opens in a new tab) calls it the falling tone, and the mark changes the word: ma (opens in a new tab) is a ghost, mà (opens in a new tab) means but. On ầ, ề and ồ the tone sits over a circumflex, and on ờ and ừ beside a horn. The Vietnamese alphabet page explains which mark is typed first.

Where is the grave accent key on US, UK, French and Italian keyboards?

The grave accent key of a US or UK keyboard is the first key of the number row, left of 1, and it types a plain ` with no letter under it. In Microsoft's data for the US keyboard (opens in a new tab), that key carries U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT without Shift, and the British layout (opens in a new tab) puts the same character on its top-left key.

Neither layout makes that key a dead key. In our Mac run the same key followed by e typed two characters, ` and e, never è.

The letters need a dead key, which waits for the next key and then types one accented character. Each keyboard below gets there by a different route:

Keyboard	The key left of 1, alone	How you get è	Layout data
US, Windows	`	no key; use a code or switch layouts	kbdus_7 file
UK, Windows	`	no key; use a code	kbduk file
US International, Windows	a dead key: then e gives è, Space gives `	the same dead key	kbdusx file
French AZERTY, Windows	²	the 7 key types è; AltGr with 7 is the grave dead key	kbdfr file
Italian, Windows	\	its own key, with é on Shift	kbdit file
Mac, U.S. or ABC	`	Option and the ` key, then e	measured, macOS 26.6.2
Chromebook with US International	a dead key: ` then the letter	the same dead key	Chromebook Help

The US International layout (opens in a new tab) turns that first key into the dead key. Followed by a, e, i, o or u it types à, è, ì, ò or ù, capitals included, and followed by Space it types the bare `. A Chromebook set to US International works alike: Google's list of special characters (opens in a new tab) gives Grave (`) as ` followed by the letter.

French and Italian keyboards carry the small letters on keys of their own. On the French layout (opens in a new tab) è sits on the 7 key, à on the 0 key and ù on a key of its own.

The French keys stay small. With Caps Lock on, the 7 and 0 keys type the digits instead. The capitals come from the dead key: AltGr with the 7 key, then a vowel.

The Italian layout (opens in a new tab) has keys for à, è, ì, ò and ù, but no ` in any state: of the five layout files we read on 2026-10-17, it was the only one without U+0060.

A Mac on the U.S. or ABC layout behaves like the US PC keyboard. On 2026-10-17 we fed its keys to Apple's UCKeyTranslate function on macOS 26.6.2. The key left of 1 typed U+0060 alone and U+007E, the tilde, with Shift.

Option with the same key started a dead key, and the next vowel came out as à, è, ì, ò or ù. Our control key behaved too: Shift with 1 gave !. Apple's accent page (opens in a new tab) describes these dead keys and points to the Keyboard Viewer, which outlines them on screen.

What is the grave accent symbol ` on its own?

The grave accent symbol ` on its own is U+0060, a spacing character that stands by itself instead of sitting on a letter. Unicode names it GRAVE ACCENT, and the names list adds backtick and backquote as other names, the ones programmers use. The grave in è is a different character, U+0300.

The same list notes that in some technical contexts U+0060 works as an opening quote, paired with the apostrophe. Unicode's chapter 7 says the code point is used only as a spacing character.

Wiktionary's entry for the symbol (opens in a new tab) gives its computing jobs: an enclosing mark in programming languages, and an old stand-in for the opening quotation mark.

In JavaScript, template literals (opens in a new tab) are delimited by it, and in Markdown a run of them opens a code span, per the CommonMark spec (opens in a new tab). Wiktionary's backtick (opens in a new tab) entry also lists its use as a dead key for grave-accented letters.

HTML even has two names for it: the table of character references (opens in a new tab) in the HTML standard gives ` and ` for U+0060, and è for è.

A Mac's grave dead key gives the symbol back. On the U.S. and ABC layouts, Option and the ` key followed by Space typed U+0060 in our run, the same character the key types alone.

The other dead keys do not: the circumflex one ends in U+02C6 and the tilde one in U+02DC, lookalikes rather than the keyboard symbols. The grave dead key also stops at the five vowels. Before n, w, y or c it typed ` and then the plain letter.

The stroke has more lookalikes than the backtick. We normalized each of them on 2026-10-17 in Node.js 26.0.0, with ICU 78.3 and Unicode 17.0. Under NFC a letter and its mark join wherever Unicode has one character for the pair; NFKC goes further and swaps wide and other compatibility forms for plain ones:

Character	Unicode name and number	What it is for	After NFC	After NFKC
◌̀	U+0300 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT	sits on the letter before it; Unicode also calls it varia	a with it becomes à, n becomes ǹ; x stays two characters	the same
`	U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT	the keyboard symbol, the backtick	after a, still a and `	unchanged
ˋ	U+02CB MODIFIER LETTER GRAVE ACCENT	tone letters: a low tone, or the Mandarin fourth tone	after a, still a and ˋ	unchanged
`	U+1FEF GREEK VARIA	the Greek accent standing alone	becomes U+0060	U+0060
◌̀	U+0340 COMBINING GRAVE TONE MARK	a tone-mark code, canonically equal to U+0300	becomes U+0300	U+0300
｀	U+FF40 FULLWIDTH GRAVE ACCENT	the wide form for East Asian text	unchanged	U+0060
´	U+00B4 ACUTE ACCENT	the acute standing alone, for comparison	unchanged	a space and U+0301

Two rows surprised us. The Greek varia is canonically the same as the backtick, so even NFC, the gentlest form, replaces it. And the backtick has no mapping back to the mark: the spacing acute splits into a space and U+0301 under NFKC, while U+0060 stays as it is.

Unicode's chapter 7 also advises against U+0340 for Vietnamese tones, despite its name, and asks for U+0300. The names list cross-references U+2035 REVERSED PRIME and U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK with the backtick. Neither one is a grave accent.