Acute accent: é, á and combining acute

Uses and scope

French uses é as an accented vowel spelling. Spanish written acutes follow accentuation rules, while Polish ć and ś are alphabet letters. Vietnamese uses the same combining mark for sắc, and Pinyin uses it for the second tone. These are current uses with different linguistic meanings. Russian may add an acute to show stress in teaching or to resolve ambiguity, but ordinary text normally omits that annotation. [16], [21], [27], [45], [46], [48], [49], [3]

Similar shapes, different characters

The grave accent slopes the other way. A straight apostrophe, a typographic apostrophe and a prime have different code points and purposes. Greek tonos can share the acute encoding, but that does not make a Greek vowel a Latin letter. NFC can compose e plus acute into é; Q plus acute remains a sequence because there is no corresponding canonical composite. [1], [2], [16], [21], [27], [45], [46], [48], [49], [3]

Typing and text forms

Copying is exact; preview circles are excluded. Compare normalization forms.

Word for Windows

Select a hex code, then Alt+X; repeat for each scalar.

Mac and mobile

Hold a letter for supported variants; use Character Viewer on Mac or a language keyboard on mobile.

HTML

Use UTF-8 text or the numeric references in Details, in order.

Full typing instructions ·HTML, CSS and JavaScript entry ·Verified Alt codes.

Sources and method

Usage statements link to the authority that supports their scope. Character names, categories, combining classes and normalization results come from the pinned Unicode data. A canonical decomposition does not establish language membership or spelling frequency.

Source access date: 2026-09-14.

• [4] Unicode combining mark names and annotations. Names, cross references and narrowly attributed usage annotations. Historical annotations are not automatically current recommendations.
• [16] OQLF: accents, diaereses and cedillas on capitals. French uppercase diacritics and orthographic categories.
• [21] RAE and ASALE: written accents in vowel sequences. Spanish accent placement has spelling rules and is not inferred solely from an isolated vowel.
• [27] Polish education platform: letters and sounds. Polish alphabet and its nine distinctive letters.
• [45] Northern Illinois University: Vietnamese tones. Six Vietnamese tone categories and example spellings. Detailed pitch descriptions are not generalized across dialects.
• [46] Gramota: Russian stress sign. Selective stress marking in ordinary text and systematic marking in learning/reference texts.
• [48] Chinese Ministry of Education: GB/T 16159, 2012. Hanyu Pinyin orthography, vowel tone marks and neutral tone; this is romanization, not added marks on Han characters.
• [49] Henan Normal University: reproduced Pinyin spelling standard. Readable university reproduction of GB/T 16159-2012; section on tone placement and unmarked neutral tone. Used alongside the official Ministry PDF.
• [3] Unicode 17: Latin, Greek and combining marks. Sections 7.1, 7.2, 7.8 and 7.9: encoded distinctions, script conventions and glyph variation, not a complete orthography.
• [1] Unicode Character Database 17.0.0.
• [2] Unicode normalization, UAX #15.
• [10] Microsoft: Unicode character entry in Word.
• [11] Apple: enter characters with accent marks.
• [12] Google: use Gboard.
• [13] Unicode: fonts and keyboards FAQ.
• [14] HTML numeric character references.

Read the editorial method and inspect the underlying datasets.