Grave Accent - Technical Notes

Technical Notes

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters à, è, ì, ò, ù, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the grave accent are available in Unicode.

In the ASCII character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character, encoded as 768, hex 300. Outside the US, character 96 is often replaced by accented letters. In the French ISO 646 standard, the character at this position is µ. Many older UK computers, such as the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, have the £ symbol as character 96, though the British ISO 646 variant ultimately placed this symbol at position 35 instead.

On many computer keyboards, the grave accent occupies a key by itself, and is meant to be combined with vowels as a multi-key combination or as a dead key to modify the following letter.

On a Mac, to get a character such as à, the user must type Option-` and then the vowel. For example, to make à, the user must type Option-` and then 'a', and to make À, the user must type Option-` and then Shift-a.

On a system running the X Window System, to get a character such as à, the user should press compose and ` together, then the vowel. The compose key on modern keyboards is usually mapped to a Windows key or shift+AltGR.

On a US and UK QWERTY keyboard, the grave accent key is placed in the top left corner. In many PC based computer games, the key is used to open the console window, allowing the user to execute commands via a CLI.