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 Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

Maltese Maltese may refer to: * Someone or something of, from, or related to Malta * Maltese alphabet * Maltese cuisine * Maltese culture * Maltese language, the Semitic language spoken by Maltese people * Maltese people, people from Malta or of Maltese ...

Occitan Occitan may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania territory in parts of France, Italy, Monaco and Spain. * Something of, from, or related to the Occitania administrative region of France. * Occitan language, spoken in parts o ...

, 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 Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overseas Vietnamese, Vietnamese people living outside Vietna ...

, 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 Taos or TAOS may refer to: Places * Taos County, New Mexico, United States ** Taos, New Mexico, a city, the county seat of Taos County, New Mexico *** Taos art colony, an art colony founded in Taos, New Mexico ** Taos Pueblo, a Native American ...

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 Thomas à Kempis, CRV ( – 25 July 1471; ; ) was a German-Dutch Catholic canon regular of the Augustinians and the author of '' The Imitation of Christ'', one of the best known Christian devotional books. His name means "Thomas of Kempen", ...

Mary Anne à Beckett Mary Anne à Beckett (29 April 1815 – 11 December 1863) was an English composer, primarily known for opera. She was the wife of the writer Gilbert à Beckett, who provided the libretti for two of her operas. Their children included the writ ...

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 Mac or MAC may refer to: Common meanings * Mac (computer), a line of personal computers made by Apple Inc. * Mackintosh, a raincoat made of rubberized cloth * Mac, a prefix to surnames derived from Gaelic languages * McIntosh (apple), a Canadi ...

, 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