È

Not to be confused with É.

È, è (e-grave) is a letter of the Latin alphabet.^[1] In English, è is formed with an addition of a grave accent onto the letter E and is sometimes used in the past tense or past participle forms of verbs in poetic texts to indicate that the final syllable should be pronounced separately. For example, blessèd would indicate the pronunciation /ˈblɛsɪd/ BLESS-id rather than /blɛst/ BLEST. It also occurs in loanwords such as Italian caffè.

E with grave
È è
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Language of origin	French
Sound values	[ɛ]
In Unicode	U+00C8, U+00E8
History
Development	È è
Other
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

In other languages

• In Emilian, è is used to represent [ɛː], e.g. lèt [lɛːt] "bed".
• In French, it always represents a [ɛ] sound of letter e when this is at the end of a syllable.
• È (è) is used in Indonesian dictionaries to represent /ɛ/ which differs from plain e (/ə/) and é (/e/). The same applies to Javanese and Sundanese.
• È means "is" in modern Italian [ɛ], e.g. il cane è piccolo meaning "the dog is small". It is derived from Latin ĕst and is accented to distinguish it from the conjunction e meaning "and". È is also used to mark a stressed [ɛ] at the end of a word only, as in caffè.
• È (è) is used in Limburgish for the [ɛ] sound, like in the word 'Sjtèl'.
• È in Norwegian (both Bokmål and Nynorsk) is used in some words to denote a longer vowel such as in karrière (career).
• È (è) is also used in Macedonian Latin as an equivalent of the letter ye with grave (Ѐ, ѐ).
• In Romagnol, it represents [ɛ], e.g. vècc' [vɛtʃː] "old men".
• È (è) is used to mark the long vowel sounds [ɛː] and [eː] in Scottish Gaelic.
• È (è) is used in Vietnamese to represent the letter "E" with the dấu huyền tone. It can also combine with "Ê" to form "Ề".
• È (è) is also used for an [ɤ] with a falling tone in pinyin, the Chinese language roman-alphabet transcription system. The word 鄂, consisting only of this vowel, is an abbreviation for the Hubei province of the People's Republic of China.

Unicode

Character information

Preview	È		è
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE		LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	200	U+00C8	232	U+00E8
UTF-8	195 136	C3 88	195 168	C3 A8
Numeric character reference	È	È	è	è
Named character reference	È		è
EBCDIC family	116	74	84	54
ISO 8859-1/3/9/14/15/16	200	C8	232	E8

Key strokes

• Microsoft Windows users can type an "è" by pressing Alt+0232 or Alt+138 on the numeric pad of the keyboard. "È" can be typed by pressing Alt+0200 or Alt+212. Linux users may type an "è" with the Compose key (default is Right Alt) by pressing ComposeE` in sequence. "È" can be typed by pressing Compose⇧ Shift+E` in sequence.

See also

• Ye with grave, a Cyrillic letter with a similar glyph.

References

1. "Unicode Character "È" (U+00C8)". Compart. Oak Brook, IL: Compart AG. 2021. Retrieved 2024-02-17.