Agrave

Agrave refers to the Latin letter A bearing a grave accent. It appears in uppercase as À and in lowercase as à. It is not a separate letter of the Latin alphabet, but a variant used in several languages to convey particular pronunciation, stress, or tone. In digital text, it has Unicode code points U+00C0 for À and U+00E0 for à; HTML entities À and à can be used, and in TeX/LaTeX the diacritic is produced with \`{A} and \`{a}.

In usage, À/à serves different purposes across languages. In French, the grave on a marks a specific vowel quality and distinguishes the preposition à (to, at) from a (has). Examples include à (to/at) and là (there). In Italian, the grave accent on vowels indicates stress placement or vowel quality; it appears in words such as città (city), where the accent guides pronunciation and stress. In Portuguese, à often forms the contracted preposition meaning “to the” or “at the” as in vou à escola. Vietnamese uses the grave as part of the tonal system on vowels, including à, to denote a falling tone. Other languages that employ À/à include Catalan and various loanwords, where the diacritic helps preserve pronunciation or orthographic distinctions.

Orthography and typography notes emphasize that À/à can be represented either as a single precomposed character or as a combination of A with a combining grave accent, depending on the text encoding and font support. Proper rendering requires fonts that include these glyphs, and normalization may be used to standardize representations in multilingual text. The character thus functions primarily as a diacritic-bearing variant of A rather than a separate alphabetic letter.

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