Italian Alphabet: Foreign j k w x y, Final Accents and È

Why does the Italian alphabet have only twenty-one letters?

Because the five letters English adds are guests in Italian. Treccani's Enciclopedia dell'Italiano (opens in a new tab) counts twenty-one letters in the Italian alphabet: sixteen for consonants and five for the vowels a, e, i, o and u. J, k, w, x and y are five more signs, used for words of foreign origin or to give a word an exotic look.

The Accademia della Crusca puts it the other way round: the English alphabet is the Italian alphabet plus j, k, x, y and w. The count has moved over the centuries. Each row below is from the same Treccani entry.

When	Alphabet	Letters	What differs from today
Latin	the Latin alphabet	twenty-three	k, x and y were in; there was no u, since v wrote both sounds
1550	Lodovico Dolce's grammar	twenty-two	x and y were in; u and v were still one letter
1600s and 1700s	Italian spelling	–	u and v finally become two letters
until 1923	the Crusca's fifth Vocabolario	–	j still wrote the plural of words in -io: studj for studi
today	Treccani's count	twenty-one, plus five	j, k, w, x and y serve foreign words

Dolce was a proofreader in a print shop, and his list of letters ran a b c d e f g h i l m n o p q r s t u x y z.

The j took longest to leave. Pirandello still wrote guajo and ajuto, and the name Jole keeps one today. The old u and v are fossils too: the Enciclopedia Italiana's publisher still spells its name Istitvto.

So why does the grid at the top of this page hold more than twenty-one letters? It shows the Unicode CLDR's index headings for Italian (opens in a new tab), the headings software splits a sorted list under. They give j, k, w, x and y a heading each, like every other letter from A to Z, and none to À or È.

CLDR's main set for Italian (opens in a new tab) adds the accented vowels à, è, é, ì, ò and ù, listed here under the grid. Italian grammar does not count those six as letters of the Italian alphabet. Treccani calls the written accent a diacritic, a sign placed on a vowel.

When must an Italian word carry a written accent?

Far less often than it is stressed, and the mark never adds a letter to the Italian alphabet. Every Italian word but a few has a stressed syllable, the Crusca's vademecum on the accent (opens in a new tab) says, yet writing marks it in only a few cases. The accent is required on:

• a word of more than one syllable stressed on the last one. The Crusca's example is "La servitù emigrò in Perù".
• these single syllables: dà, dì, è, là, lì, né, sé, sì, tè, ciò, già, giù, più, può and scià.

Treccani's entry on the written accent (opens in a new tab) adds compounds built from one-syllable words: trentatré and Oltrepò keep the mark.

The first nine syllables in that list each have a twin without the accent. The mark is the only thing that tells them apart in writing. The meanings below are the Crusca's.

With the accent	What it is	Without	What it is
dà	gives, from dare	da	from, a preposition
dì	day	di	of, a preposition
è	is, from essere	e	and
là	there	la	the, or her
lì	there	li	them
né	nor	ne	of it, or from there
sé	oneself	se	if
sì	yes	si	a pronoun
tè	tea	te	you

Every other single syllable goes bare. The Crusca names the ones people get wrong: su, do, sto, fa, sta, qui and qua never take an accent. Nobody confuses the two do, it notes, any more than the two re.

Treccani lists stò, quà and fù among the commonest errors, even from educated writers. Film subtitles agree. In FrequencyWords, the subtitle word list behind this page's Italian words, quì is still a common entry. A data check here on 2026-10-14 also found piu, with no accent at all, ranked just below più.

Inside a word, the accent is optional. Write it only when two words would look the same: l'àncora della nave, the ship's anchor, against non è ancóra tornato, he has not come back yet. Both examples are the Crusca's.

Is it perché or perchè? The grave and the acute on an Italian e

Perché, with the acute. The Crusca's vademecum explains the two Italian accent marks with exactly this pair. The acute rises from left to right and marks the closed e of perché. The grave falls and marks the open e of caffè. Most people draw one loose slash for both, the Crusca says, but correct Italian keeps them apart, and a keyboard has a key for each.

The rule for e is a short list. These take the acute: affinché, benché, cosicché, finché, giacché, né, nonché, perché, poiché, purché, sé as a pronoun, sicché, ventitré and every compound of tre, such as trentatré. So does the past tense of verbs like battere, potere and ripetere: batté, poté, ripeté. Every other final e takes the grave: è, tè, caffè.

The other vowels need less thought. Treccani's rule covers all five Italian accent marks on a final vowel:

Final vowel	Written	Treccani's rule	Example
a	à	always the grave	libertà
e, open	è	the grave	caffè
e, closed	é	the acute	perché
i	ì	the grave; some publishers use í	colibrì
o	ò	the grave; ó only in the Roman interjection ahó	però
u	ù	the grave; some publishers use ú	virtù

That o row explains a gap in the table of Italian accents above. No Italian word ends in ó, so CLDR lists ò among its Italian characters and puts ó, í and ú with the auxiliary characters further down.

Treccani adds that computers and phones keep the grave and the acute apart, and some correct perché on their own. Not everyone types with that help. The same subtitle data has perchè, with the wrong grave, far less often than perché, but still among its common entries. The Crusca blames the habit of typing an apostrophe for the accent: once the marks blur, perchè, poichè and giacchè follow.

How do you type a capital È when the Italian keyboard has no key for it?

With a code or a dead key, because the key is not there. Treccani is clear about the goal. When è, is, opens a sentence, the correct form is È with a grave, not E' with an apostrophe. The same goes for words in capitals: IMMUNITÀ, not IMMUNITA', and COMPILÒ, not COMPILO'.

The apostrophe habit has a cause. The Crusca's note on letter plus apostrophe (opens in a new tab) traces it to early email and chat, when plain ASCII had no accented letters. Capitals are written that way almost every time, it says, because ordinary keyboards have no keys for accented capitals. Outside the screen, it calls the apostrophe a mark of carelessness.

A check of Microsoft's two Italian layouts, the Italian keyboard (opens in a new tab) and Italian (142) (opens in a new tab), bears that out. Read on 2026-10-14, both have keys for à, è, ì, ò and ù, and give é on the è key with Shift. Caps Lock leaves those keys small. No key, in any state, types an accented capital, or ó. The Italian keyboard page draws both layouts key by key and types each capital with Shift. Elsewhere, each capital needs its own method. These steps come from the vendor facts for each letter.

Capital	Needed in	Windows	Mac	Microsoft Word
È	a sentence that opens with è, is	Alt+0200	Option+`, then Shift+E	Ctrl+`, then Shift+E
À	IMMUNITÀ	Alt+0192	Option+`, then Shift+A	Ctrl+`, then Shift+A
É	PERCHÉ	Alt+0201	Option+E, then Shift+E	Ctrl+', then Shift+E
Ì	LUNEDÌ	Alt+0204	Option+`, then Shift+I	Ctrl+`, then Shift+I
Ò	COMPILÒ	Alt+0210	Option+`, then Shift+O	Ctrl+`, then Shift+O
Ù	PIÙ	Alt+0217	Option+`, then Shift+U	Ctrl+`, then Shift+U

For a Windows code, hold Alt and type the four digits on the number pad. On a Mac and in Word, the first step is a dead key: press it, let go, then press the letter with Shift.

Why does Italian keep the letter h if it never says it?

Because h is there to be read, not heard. Treccani's entry on the Italian alphabet says h never stands for a sound, apart from an optional breath in interjections like ah, eh and oh. It calls h the diacritic sign above all others.

In ch and gh, the h keeps c and g hard before e and i. The entry on digraphs (opens in a new tab) gives chiesa and anche: without the h, c before e or i would be read as the c of cesta, basket.

The h has had to defend its place. In Pier Jacopo Martello's 1723 farce Il piato dell'H, the dispute over the H, the letter wins the right to stay in the Italian alphabet, but not in Italian speech.

Early in the twentieth century it nearly lost a second case. Some grammars, Pier Gabriele Goidanich's among them, proposed an accent in place of the h of the verb avere: ò for ho, I have, and à for ha, he has. Treccani says the spelling caught on for a while, even with well-known writers. Today ho and ha keep their h, and the accent stays on the last vowel, where Italian puts it.

The letter's name is acca. In Treccani's dictionary (opens in a new tab), non capire un'acca, not to understand an h, means to understand nothing at all, because the h in Italian has no sound of its own.