This is nonstandard but is especially common when typing capital letters: * E` or * E’ instead of È (' is'). Typists who use a keyboard without accented characters and are unfamiliar with input methods for typing accented letters sometimes use a separate grave accent or even an apostrophe instead of the proper accent character. Some examples of words with a final grave accent are città ('city'), così ('so/then/thus'), più ('more'/'plus'), Mosè ('Moses'), and portò (' brought/carried'). Words that end with stressed -e or -o may bear either an acute accent or a grave accent, depending on whether the final e or o sound is closed or open, respectively. The grave accent marks the stressed vowels of words in Maltese, Catalan, and Italian.Ī general rule in Italian is that words that end with stressed -a, -i, or -u must be marked with a grave accent. The accent mark was called βαρεῖα, the feminine form of the adjective βαρύς ( barús), meaning 'heavy' or 'low in pitch.' This was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as gravis, which then became the English word grave. The grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography.

In modern practice, it replaces an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when that word is followed immediately by another word. The grave accent first appeared in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to mark a lower pitch than the high pitch of the acute accent.

A with accent above