Cafe With Accent: Café or Cafe, Which Is Right?

Every verdict in the table is read from a page that answered AccentPad on 2026-10-18. Merriam-Webster and the Cambridge Dictionary answered 403, a refusal, so this page quotes neither. Whether you write cafe with accent mark or without one, you are in good company: the dictionaries lead with café, and the two newsroom style guides drop the mark.

Where does the é in café come from?

From French, where café is the ordinary word for coffee. Larousse's senses run from the bean and the drink to the place where drinks are served, and it traces the word from Turkish kahve through Italian caffè. English use dates from 1780–90 in Dictionary.com, and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary dates the borrowing to the early 19th century. Both take it from French café, coffee or coffee house.

The accent is the accent aigu, which Larousse defines as the mark French uses for a closed e. The OQLF notes that a final é can be followed only by a mute e or by the s of a plural or the e of a feminine. That is why French writes cafés, with the mark kept before the s.

Café, cafe, caffè or coffee: which word is which?

The coffee words of English and its neighbours look alike, but they come from different languages and carry different marks, or none. The table sets each spelling beside its language, its mark and what a dictionary says it means.

Word	Language	Mark	What the dictionary says	Source
café	French, and English	acute accent, é	coffee, and the place that serves it	Larousse; American Heritage Dictionary
cafe	English	none	a place where you can buy drinks and simple meals	Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
caffè	Italian	grave accent, è	coffee, from Turkish kahve and Arabic qahwa	Treccani
coffee	English	none	from Turkish kahveh and Arabic qahwa, probably via Dutch koffie, late 16th century	Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

Caffè ends in a different letter: è, with the grave accent, not the acute é of café. English meets it in caffè latte.

The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary heads its entry latte, "also caffè latte", with the grave accent, while the American Heritage Dictionary writes caffe latte with no mark at all. Both e letters, and the other accented forms of e, are on the e with accent page.

Do café au lait and café crème keep their accents?

Café au lait and café crème hold on to the mark more firmly than café on its own. The American Heritage Dictionary, which accepts cafe, gives café au lait only with the accent, from French café, coffee, with à, with, and lait, milk. Its second sense is a light coffee hue.

Larousse spells the colour with hyphens, une peau café-au-lait, and the drink without them, boire un café au lait.

Crème is cream in Larousse, and as a masculine noun, un crème, it is the familiar name for a café crème, coffee with cream. Both are whole French phrases in English, which is why the dictionary that lets you write cafe still prints café au lait.

Is CAFE in capitals a different word?

In American English it can be. The American Heritage Dictionary and Dictionary.com both list CAFE, in capitals, as an abbreviation for corporate average fuel economy.

Dictionary.com defines it as a US federally mandated standard of average miles per gallon for the cars a manufacturer produces in a year. A sign over a door that reads CAFE is still a cafe to every reader, but in a report about cars the capitals name the fuel rule.

French keeps the accent on capitals. The Académie française asks for accented capitals in good typography, À included, because a missing accent slows reading and can mislead. A French café's sign therefore reads CAFÉ, and the methods table above has the capital É for it.

Is a café the same thing in every English-speaking country?

Not quite. In South African English, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary says, a cafe is a small shop that sells sweets, newspapers and food and usually stays open later than other shops.

Collins, on Dictionary.com, lists a corner shop or grocer among its senses. In Britain and the United States a cafe serves drinks and simple meals, and the Oxford dictionary adds that alcohol is not usually served in British or American cafes.

The stress moves as well. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary stresses the first syllable in British English, /ˈkæfeɪ/, and the second in American English, /kæˈfeɪ/. If you type the word often, a Mac text replacement can turn cafe into café as you type; the Mac accents guide shows where to set one up.