Grave accent: à, è and combining grave

Uses and scope

French uses the grave in spellings with à, è and ù; Italian commonly uses à, è, ì, ò and ù. Portuguese grave accents appear in specified contractions. Vietnamese uses it for huyền, and Pinyin uses it for the fourth tone. A grave therefore does not have one universal pronunciation or stress value. [16], [24], [23], [45], [48], [49], [4]

Similar shapes, different characters

Do not replace è with e followed by a backtick. U+0340 COMBINING GRAVE TONE MARK is a legacy character canonically equivalent to U+0300; Unicode discourages its use for new text. The ordinary grave should also be kept separate from an apostrophe or acute, even when a font makes the strokes look similar. [1], [2], [16], [24], [23], [45], [48], [49], [4]

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.
• [24] Accademia della Crusca: accents and apostrophes. Italian accented forms and apostrophe distinctions; the canonical source URL has an unrelated legacy slug.
• [23] Portuguese Orthographic Agreement. Bases on accentuation, tilde, cedilla and removal of ordinary Portuguese diaeresis, with proper-name exceptions.
• [45] Northern Illinois University: Vietnamese tones. Six Vietnamese tone categories and example spellings. Detailed pitch descriptions are not generalized across dialects.
• [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.
• [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.