U0060

U+0060, commonly called the grave accent or backtick, is the Unicode code point assigned to the grave accent character used in various scripts and computing contexts. It is located in the Basic Latin block, and its code point value is 96 in decimal. In UTF-8, it encodes as a single byte, 0x60. The visible glyph is the small mark placed to the left of a letter or on the letter itself, depending on typography and input methods.

In writing systems, the grave accent is used as a diacritic on vowels in several languages to indicate specific vowel qualities or stress patterns. Examples include à, è, ì, ò, ù. The diacritic is distinct from other tone or accent marks such as the acute or circumflex. The bare grave accent may also appear in transliteration, phonetic notation, or as a typographic symbol in certain contexts.

In computing and digital text, the character is often referred to as the backtick. It is commonly found on keyboards on the key paired with the tilde (~). It has uses in programming and shell environments, such as command substitution in some shells when enclosed within backticks. In modern programming languages, backticks may delimit template literals or be used as string delimiters in specific syntaxes. The grave accent is related in encoding and typography to combining marks such as the combining grave accent (U+0300), which can be applied diacritically to base letters.