graveaccent

Grave accent, also called grave diacritic or accent grave, is a diacritic mark used in several writing systems to modify the sound value or meaning of a letter. It is placed to the left of the base letter and appears as a small, slanted line. In digital text, the grave accent character is the ASCII symbol `, often referred to as backtick or backquote in programming and shell contexts.

Languages such as French, Italian, Catalan, and Scottish Gaelic employ the grave to indicate specific vowel qualities or to distinguish otherwise identical words. Examples include French où (where) versus ou (or), è in French or è in Italian, and à indicating a particular phonetic or grammatical contrast in certain words. The exact function of the grave varies by language; in some systems it marks open vowels, in others it signals a stressed syllable or a historical vowel change.

Outside natural languages, the grave accent is a key symbol in computing and typography. The character ` is widely used as a backtick in shells and programming languages for command substitution and template literals, and may appear in Markdown to delimit code blocks. In font design and encoding, grave accents are treated as diacritical marks attached to specific letters, though their exact rendering can differ across scripts and fonts.