À, à ( a-

grave A grave is a location where a cadaver, dead body (typically that of a human, although sometimes that of an animal) is burial, buried or interred after a funeral. Graves are usually located in special areas set aside for the purpose of buria ...

) is a letter of the Catalan, Emilian-Romagnol, French, Italian, Maltese, Occitan, Portuguese, Sardinian,

Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic (, ; Endonym and exonym, endonym: ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a member of the Goidelic language, Goidelic branch of Celtic, Scottish Gaelic, alongs ...

, Vietnamese, and Welsh languages consisting of the letter A of the

ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and u ...

and a grave accent. À is also used in

Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

transliteration. In most languages, it represents the vowel ''a''. This letter is also a letter in Taos to indicate a mid tone. In accounting or invoices, ''à'' abbreviates "at a rate of": "5 apples à $1" (one dollar each). That usage is based upon the French

preposition Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...

''à'' and has evolved into the at sign (@). Sometimes, it is part of a surname: Thomas à Kempis, Mary Anne à Beckett.

Usage in various languages

Emilian-Romagnol

À is used in Emilian to represent short stressed e.g. Bolognese dialect ''sacàtt'' aˈkatː"sack".

French

The grave accent is used in the

French language French ( or ) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-R ...

to differentiate

homophone A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning or in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, a ...

s, e.g. and .

Portuguese

À is used in Portuguese to represent a contraction of the feminine singular definite article ''a'' with the preposition ''a'' or the demonstrative ''aquele'' and its inflections and derivations (''aquela, aquilo, aqueles, aquelas, aqueloutro(a)'', etc): : ''Ele foi à praia''. : He went to the beach. : ''É igual àquela camisa que eu tinha''. : It's identical to that shirt I had. ''À'' is always unstressed, as opposed to ''Á'' and ''Â'', which are always stressed.

Scottish Gaelic

In early orthographic descriptions of Scottish Gaelic from the 18th and 19th centuries, à is the only way to represent a long later forms of Scottish Gaelic also used the acute accent �to indicate a longer sound.

Character mappings

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

users can type an "à" by pressing or on the numeric pad of the keyboard. "À" can be typed by pressing . On a Mac, you hold , and then let go and type . Similarly on a

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

system, where the

Compose key A compose key (sometimes called multi key) is a key on a computer keyboard that indicates that the following (usually 2 or more) keystrokes trigger the insertion of an alternate character, typically a precomposed character or a symbol. For insta ...

can be configured.

References

Latin letters with diacritics Polish letters with diacritics {{Latin-script-stub