Symbols

À / à (A With Grave Accent): How to Type and Copy It

ByGlenda Jnku

Copy and paste à

The grave-accented a in both cases, with the codes you’re likely to need. Use the grid above to copy with one click; this table is the reference.

Character	Unicode	Windows	Mac	HTML
à	U+00E0	Alt + 0224	Option + ` , a	à
À	U+00C0	Alt + 0192	Option + ` , Shift + A	À

How to type à on any device

Type à on Windows

Turn on Num Lock, hold Alt, and type 0224 on the numeric keypad for à, or 0192 for the capital À. The US-International keyboard also lets you press the backtick then a to get à directly.

Type à on Mac

Press Option + ` (the backtick key, top-left), which arms the grave accent, then press a, and à appears. For the capital, do Option + `, then Shift + a.

Type à on iPhone and Android

Press and hold the a key on the keyboard. A row of accented options pops up; slide onto à and lift your finger. The same long-press also shows á, so pick the one that leans left (grave).

Type à in Microsoft Word

Press Ctrl + ` (Ctrl and the backtick key), release, then press a for à. You can also type 00E0 then Alt + X, or use Alt + 0224.

Type à on Linux

Press Ctrl + Shift + U, type 00e0, then Enter. With a Compose key, Compose then ` then a also makes à.

Type à in HTML and CSS

In HTML, à is à or the numeric à (capital À is À). In CSS, a literal à in a content value is the escaped code point \00E0.

What the grave accent on à means by language

The grave does different jobs in different languages; here are the main ones.

Language	What à does	Example
Italian	stress on final vowel	città (city)
French	tells words apart / “to, at”	à (to)
Catalan	open vowel / stress	català
Portuguese	the à contraction (crase)	à (to the)

Acute vs grave: which way does it lean?

The quickest thing to get straight is the direction, because à (grave) and á (acute) are different letters. The grave accent leans back to the left, like the start of the word grave going downhill: `. The acute leans forward to the right: ´. An easy memory trick: grave goes down to the left, the way the sky falls; the acute rises to the right.

The direction isn’t decoration — it changes the letter and often the sound. In French, é (acute) and è (grave) are pronounced differently, and in Italian the grave marks an open vowel. So when you long-press the a on a phone and see both à and á, the one that leans left is the grave you want here. If a word looks subtly wrong, you may have grabbed the acute by mistake; copy the correct à from the grid above.

The French à vs a: ‘to’ versus ‘has’

In French, the grave on à does something clever: it tells apart two tiny words that would otherwise look identical. à (with the accent) is a preposition meaning to, at, or in. a (no accent) is the verb, has (from avoir). They sound the same, so the accent is the only thing distinguishing them in writing.

So il a means “he has,” and il va à Paris means “he goes to Paris.” Drop the accent and à Paris becomes the nonsensical “has Paris.” French uses the grave this way for several word pairs, like où (where) vs ou (or) and là (there) vs la (the), where the accent carries the whole meaning even though it doesn’t change the sound.

With grave	Means	Without	Means
à	to / at	a	has
là	there	la	the

The Italian grave: città, caffè, and è vs e

Italian leans on the grave heavily. It marks a stressed final vowel, which is why so many Italian words end in an accented letter: città (city), papà (dad), caffè (coffee), però (but). Without the accent, a reader would stress the wrong syllable.

The grave also separates words, most famously è (with grave, meaning “is”) from e (no accent, meaning “and”). Marco è alto is “Marco is tall”; Marco e Anna is “Marco and Anna.” One little stroke flips the meaning, which is why Italians never leave it off.

The grave accent’s other lives: the backtick and belovèd

The grave accent has a couple of surprising careers outside accented letters. Its ASCII cousin, the backtick ` (U+0060), sits on your keyboard and is really a lone grave accent. In code it does big jobs: it wraps inline code in Markdown, and in JavaScript it marks template literals (`hello ${name}`). That backtick is not the same character as the accent on à — it’s a standalone symbol — but they share a shape and a history.

The grave also has a poetic use in English. Writers sometimes put it on a normally-silent -ed ending to say “pronounce this as a separate syllable”: belovèd (be-lov-ed), blessèd (bless-ed), learnèd (learn-ed, as an adjective). It’s the one place the grave shows up in English, and it’s a signal to the reader to slow down and sound out the extra beat — common in hymns, Shakespeare, and older verse.

à in code, URLs, and domain names

In a URL, à is percent-encoded as %C3%A0 (its two UTF-8 bytes), so a page about città might appear as citt%C3%A0. In code, the escape is \u00E0 in JavaScript, Java, JSON, and Python.

Domains can include à through internationalized domain names (IDN), converted behind the scenes to an ASCII Punycode form starting xn--; browsers sometimes show that form as an anti-phishing safeguard. And if à ever renders as à or a box, the fix is to serve everything as UTF-8.

Copy-paste HTML codes

Every code for the grave-accented a in one place. Click a cell and copy.

Character	Named entity	Numeric entity	URL (percent) code
à	à	à	%C3%A0
À	À	À	%C3%80

In a CSS content value, use \00E0 for à. For the acute counterpart see [a with acute](/a-with-acute/), for the grave e see [e with grave](/e-with-grave/), and for the whole set the [letters with accents](/letters-with-accents/) hub.

Troubleshooting

My à shows as a box or garbled text

That’s an encoding mismatch: the UTF-8 bytes for à are being read as an older encoding. Set the file, database, and page charset to UTF-8 and à displays correctly.

I got á (acute) instead of à (grave)

You picked the version that leans right. The grave à leans left; the acute á leans right. From a phone long-press, choose the left-leaning one, or copy the correct à from the grid above.

Option + backtick does nothing on my Mac

Option + ` arms the accent but shows nothing until you press the letter. Press a straight after. If it still fails, your layout may not support dead keys; switch to the standard US or ABC layout.

FAQ

How do I type à?

On Windows, hold Alt and type 0224. On a Mac, press Option + ` then a. On a phone, long-press the a key. In Word, press Ctrl + ` then a. Or click à in the grid above.

What’s the difference between à and á?

The direction of the stroke. à has a grave accent that leans left; á has an acute that leans right. They’re different letters and often sound different, so the lean matters.

What does à mean in French?

à (with the grave) is a preposition meaning “to” or “at,” while a (no accent) is the verb “has.” The accent is the only thing telling the two apart in writing, since they sound the same.

Why do Italian words end in à?

Italian uses the grave to mark a stressed final vowel, as in città, papà, and caffè. Without it, readers would stress the wrong syllable. Italian also uses è (is) versus e (and).

How do I write à in HTML?

Use à or à (capital À is À). In a URL, à is %C3%A0.