Grave accent
How Grave accent works
The grave accent (`) slopes down-left over a vowel, opposite to the acute accent's direction. In Italian, it marks stressed final syllables: "citta" (city), "perche" (why/because). French uses it to distinguish homophones: "ou" (or) vs "ou" (where), and "a" (has) vs "a" (at/to).
In ASCII, code 96 is the standalone grave accent character (`), widely repurposed in programming: JavaScript uses it for template literals, Markdown uses it for inline code, and Unix shells use it for command substitution (though
In ASCII, code 96 is the standalone grave accent character (`), widely repurposed in programming: JavaScript uses it for template literals, Markdown uses it for inline code, and Unix shells use it for command substitution (though
$() is now preferred). Pre-composed grave-accented letters are available in ISO-8859-1. See the grave character group for the complete list.