À

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

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

^ ^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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[:0-1] Ross, Susan (2016). The standardisation of Scottish Gaelic orthography 1750-2007: a corpus approach (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow.

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