Grave accent in the context of "Diacritics"

A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"), from διακρίνω (diakrínō, "to distinguish"). The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨ó⟩, grave ⟨ò⟩, and circumflex ⟨ô⟩ (all shown above an 'o'), are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.

The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the <oo> letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced /ˈkuːpəreɪt/. Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can indicate that a vowel is to be pronounced differently than is normal in that position, for example not reduced to /ə/ or silent as in the case of the two uses of the letter e in the noun résumé (as opposed to the verb resume) and the help sometimes provided in the pronunciation of some words such as doggèd, learnèd, blessèd, and especially words pronounced differently than normal in poetry (for example movèd, breathèd).

In typography, overstrike is a method of printing characters that are missing from the printer's character set. The character is created by placing one character on another one – for example, overstriking ⟨L⟩ with ⟨-⟩ results in printing a ⟨Ł⟩ (L with stroke) character.

The ASCII code supports six different diacritics. These are: grave accent, tilde, acute accent (approximated by the apostrophe), diaeresis (double quote), cedilla (comma), and circumflex accent. Each is typed by typing the preceding character, then backspace, and then the 'related character', which is ⟨`⟩, ⟨~⟩, ⟨'⟩, ⟨"⟩, or ⟨^⟩, respectively for the above-mentioned accents.

The backtick ` is a typographical mark used mainly in computing. It is also known as backquote, grave, or grave accent.

The character was designed for typewriters to add a grave accent to a (lower-case) base letter, by overtyping it atop that letter. On early computer systems, however, this physical dead key+overtype function was rarely supported, being functionally replaced by precomposed characters. Consequently, this ASCII symbol was rarely (if ever) used in computer systems for its original aim and became repurposed in computer programming for many unrelated uses.

È, è (e-grave) is a letter of the Latin alphabet. 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, as opposed to /blɛst/ BLEST for the word blessed. It also occurs in loanwords such as Italian caffè.

Secondary stress (or obsolete: secondary accent) is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word, the stronger degree of stress being called primary. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the secondarily stressed syllable, as before the -nun- in proˌnunciˈation (the higher vertical line denotes primary stress). Another tradition in English is to assign acute and grave accents for primary and secondary stress, respectively: pronùnciátion.

Most languages have at most one degree of stress on the phonemic level (English can contrast up to four levels of stress, that is, three degrees of stressed and one unstressed, according to some analyses). That is, each syllable has stress or it does not. Many languages have rhythmic stress; location of the stress may not be predictable, but when the location of one stressed syllable (which may be the primary stress) is known, certain syllables before or after can be predicted to also be stressed; these may have secondary stress. An example is Dutch, where the rule is that initial and final syllables (word boundaries) take secondary stress, then every alternate syllable before and after the primary stress, as long as two stressed syllables are not adjacent and stress does not fall on /ə/ (there are, however, some exceptions to this rule). See Dutch phonology § Stress. A similar rule applies in Romanian: secondary stress falls on every alternate syllable, starting with the first, as long as it does not fall adjacent to the primary stress. In other languages (including Egyptian Radio Arabic, Bhojpuri, Cayuga, Estonian, Hawaiian, Kaure, Malayalam, and Warrgamay), secondary stress can be predicted to fall on heavy syllables.