Acute accent

The acute accent (´, ◌́) is a special mark used in many modern written languages. It appears above certain letters and helps show how those letters should be pronounced. Languages that use alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts often include this mark.

In the Latin and Greek alphabets, there are special characters that already include the acute accent. These are called precomposed characters and make writing easier in those languages.

The acute accent is important because it helps people read and say words correctly. Without it, some words might be hard to understand or could be pronounced the wrong way. It is one of many marks, called diacritics, that help make writing clearer.

Uses

History

An early version of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin writing to show long vowels.

The acute accent was first used in French in 1530 by a royal printer.

Pitch

Ancient Greek

The acute accent was used in Ancient Greek writing to show a syllable with a high sound. In Modern Greek, it marks the stressed syllable of a word.

Stress

The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages.

Height

The acute accent marks the height of some stressed vowels in various languages.

Length

Long vowels

The acute accent marks long vowels in several languages.

Short vowels

The acute accent marks short vowels in some languages.

Palatalization

A similar mark shows a soft sound in several languages.

Tone

In some languages, the acute accent shows a rising sound.

Disambiguation

The acute accent helps to tell apart words that would otherwise look the same.

Emphasis

In some languages, the acute accent can show emphasis on a word.

Letter extension

In some languages, letters with an acute accent are considered separate letters.

Other uses

The acute accent has other uses in different languages.

English

In English, the acute accent is sometimes used in foreign words to show their original pronunciation.

Typographic form

In Western writing, the acute accent is usually drawn from top to bottom. In French, it is described as going "from right to left," meaning it slopes down from the top right to the lower left.

In Polish, a different mark called the kreska is used. It looks different from the usual acute accent, being more vertical and placed more to the right. Because computers treat the kreska the same as the acute accent, designers have to carefully choose how to show letters like o acute, ⟨ó⟩. Special font technology called OpenType helps by automatically choosing the right shape based on the language. Modern fonts like Roboto and Noto try to create designs that work for many languages.

In Pinyin, the Chinese writing system, the acute accent marks a rising tone. This means the accent is drawn from lower left to top right, which is the opposite of the Western style. Designers solve this problem in different ways: some keep the Western style (like in Arial/Times New Roman), some flip it (like in Adobe HeiTi Std/SimSun), and some use a simple style without changes (like in SimHei).

Unicode

Unicode includes special characters for letters with acute accents, shown as precomposed characters. It also allows creating new symbols by adding the combining character (U+0301 ◌́ COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT and U+0317 ◌̗ COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT BELOW) to any letter. However, these custom symbols might not be used in real writing and are not shown in the table.

Keyboard input

Further information: Unicode input

Main article: List of QWERTY keyboard language variants

Computer keyboards in many countries have a special key called AltGr (or the Option key). This key helps create extra letters. For example, pressing AltGr and the letter "a" makes "á", and AltGr with "A" makes "Á". Many languages need these special letters, so some keyboards are made just for them.

Some keyboards, like the usual ones in the United States, don’t have keys for these special letters. Instead, they use a "dead key". This is a key that doesn’t do anything alone but changes the next key you press. For example, pressing the right Alt key and then the apostrophe key (‘) does nothing by itself, but when you press another letter after that, it adds the right accent to that letter. This was also how old typewriters worked.