À
À, à (a-grave) is a letter of the Catalan, Dutch, Emilian-Romagnol, French, Galician, Italian, Maltese, Occitan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, 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.
When denoting quantity, à means "each": "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
À is used in the French language to differentiate homophones, e.g. the third person conjugation of a "[he/she/it] has" and à "at, in, and to".
Portuguese
À is used in Portuguese to represent a contraction of the feminine singular definite article A with the preposition A.
Character mappings
| Preview | À | à | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE | LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | 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.