How to type A with Grave
To type A with Grave (à), press Alt + 0224 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + `, A on Mac, or write à in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00E0 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00e0 on Linux, or 00e0 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Latin Small Letter A With Grave
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00E0
- Windows
- Alt + 0224
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0224 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + `, A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | à | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00E0 | LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE |
Other accents symbols
à lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Ll, a lowercase letter. It has an uppercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.
à has a decomposed form: it can also be written as U+0061 Latin Small Letter A, U+0300 Combining Grave Accent. The two look identical and are not equal as strings, which is why a search for a word containing à sometimes fails against text that was typed on a different system. Everything on this site uses the single-codepoint (NFC) form shown here.
Its uppercase counterpart is À (U+00C0). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.
Typing à without switching keyboard
à is the letter A carrying a grave accent, and it is needed in French, Portuguese and Italian. It is one character rather than two: a spell checker treats it as a letter of those alphabets, not as A with something added.
Both of the routes worth knowing compose the letter rather than looking it up. On a Mac press Option + `, let go, then press a: nothing appears until the second key, because the first one is a dead key waiting for a letter to sit under. On Windows the same idea needs the United States-International layout, which turns the backtick key into the same dead key. Add that layout once under Language and region, and à costs two keystrokes from then on rather than four digits on a numeric keypad.
How A with Grave behaves in software
à is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.
Every way to write A with Grave
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00E0 |
| Decimal | 224 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C3 A0 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 E0 |
| HTML entity | à |
| HTML numeric | à or à |
| CSS | \00E0 |
| JavaScript | \u00E0 |
| Python | \u00E0 |
| URL-encoded | %C3%A0 |
| SVG | 00E0.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If à arrives as Ã
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C3 A0 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00E0.