À

For the Cyrillic letter А̀, see A with grave (Cyrillic).
Latin letter A with grave

À, à (a-grave) is a letter of the Catalan, Emilian-Romagnol, French, Italian, Maltese, Occitan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic,[1] Vietnamese, and Welsh languages consisting of the letter A of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and a grave accent. À is also used in Pinyin transliteration. In most languages, it represents the vowel a. This letter is also a letter in Taos to indicate a mid tone.

In accounting or invoices, à abbreviates "at a rate of": "5 apples à $1" (one dollar each). That usage is based upon the French preposition à and has evolved into the at sign (@). Sometimes, it is part of a surname: Thomas à Kempis, Mary Anne à Beckett.

Usage in various languages

Emilian-Romagnol

À is used in Emilian to represent short stressed [a], e.g. Bolognese dialect sacàtt [saˈkatː] "sack".

French

The grave accent is used in the French language to differentiate homophones, e.g. la 'the.F.SG' and là 'there'.

Portuguese

Further information: Crasis § Portuguese

À is used in Portuguese to represent a contraction of the feminine singular definite article a with the preposition a or the demonstrative aquele and its inflections and derivations (aquela, aquilo, aqueles, aquelas, aqueloutro(a), etc):

Ele foi à praia.
He went to the beach.
É igual àquela camisa que eu tinha.
It's identical to that shirt I had.

À is always unstressed, as opposed to Á and Â, which are always stressed.

Scottish Gaelic

In early orthographic descriptions of Scottish Gaelic from the 18th and 19th centuries, à is the only way to represent a long [a]; later forms of Scottish Gaelic also used the acute accent [á] to indicate a longer [a] sound.[1]

Character mappings

Character information
Preview À à
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE
Encodings decimal hex dec hex
Unicode 192 U+00C0 224 U+00E0
UTF-8 195 128 C3 80 195 160 C3 A0
Numeric character reference À À à à
Named character reference À à
ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 192 C0 224 E0

Microsoft Windows users can type an "à" by pressing Alt+133 or Alt+0224 on the numeric pad of the keyboard. "À" can be typed by pressing Alt+0192. On a Mac, you hold ⌥ Option+`, and then let go and type a. Similarly on a GNU/Linux system, where the Compose key can be configured.

References

  1. ^ a b Ross, Susan (2016). The standardisation of Scottish Gaelic orthography 1750-2007: a corpus approach (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow.
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