Á

Á (lowercase á) is a Latin letter consisting of the letter A with an acute accent (´) above it. In Unicode it is encoded twice, as U+00C1 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE and U+00E1 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE, both in the Latin-1 Supplement block, and it is used in languages including Czech, Dutch, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Portuguese, Slovak, and Spanish.^{1 • 2}

Encoding and normalization

Á exists in Unicode in two canonically equivalent forms: the single precomposed code point U+00C1, and the two-character sequence of the base letter A followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. The precomposed character carries a canonical decomposition mapping to that sequence, so the two forms must be treated as equal by conformant software.^{2 • 5}

The Unicode Normalization Algorithm resolves this duplication. Normalization Form C (NFC) composes the sequence back into the precomposed character, and is the composed form favored for use on the web; Normalization Form D (NFD) decomposes Á into A plus the combining accent.^{6 • 5} For example, the string "á" is Unicode-normalized as raw characters, but in normalization form C it should have been normalized to U+00E1.⁵ When several accents combine on one base letter, normalization selects a canonical ordering; the combining acute accent has combining class 230, and adjacent characters A and B are swapped only when ccc(A) > ccc(B) > 0, ordering marks by increasing non-zero combining class without moving them across class-zero characters.³

This arrangement is protected by the Unicode Character Encoding Stability Policy: once a character is assigned, its decomposition mapping and canonical combining class will not change in any later version of the standard. The policy gives U+00C1 itself as an example, stating that its decomposition mapping cannot be changed to <U+0042, U+0301> (B, acute).⁴

Grapheme status

From a user's point of view, Á is a single character, but in the decomposed form it is represented by two Unicode code points. Unicode calls such a user-perceived unit a grapheme, and its grapheme clusters are defined so that a base character together with any following combining marks counts as one cluster.⁷ A key property of these clusters is that they remain unchanged across all canonically equivalent forms of the text, so the boundaries are the same whether the text is in NFC or NFD; this makes the grapheme cluster a usable unit for searching, regular expressions, and collation.⁸ Grapheme clusters also behave as units in editing: with an accented character represented as a character sequence, pressing the right arrow key moves from the start of the base character to the end of the last mark in the cluster.⁹

Use in languages

Most languages that use the Latin script treat letters with diacritical marks as variations of the base letter rather than as independent letters of the alphabet.¹⁰ The acute accent on A carries different functions in the languages that use it: the EU Vocabularies character table lists Á as used in Czech, Dutch, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Portuguese, Slovak, and Spanish.¹ In Spanish, for example, the acute accent marks stressed vowels, and the character is described as representing a vowel sound with stress or high tone.¹¹

Related precomposed characters extend the same pattern: Ǻ and ǻ (A with ring above and acute, U+01FA and U+01FB) decompose as Å plus the combining acute accent, showing how a second accent is layered onto an already accented base letter.¹²

References

1. Latin letters, EU Vocabularies, Publications Office of the EU
2. C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement, Unicode 18.0.0 names list
3. UTR #15: Unicode Normalization (revision 18)
4. Unicode Character Encoding Stability Policies
5. Unicode FAQ: Normalization
6. ISO document WG2 N2352 on normalization forms
7. UTR #18: Unicode Regular Expression Guidelines
8. UAX #29: Unicode Text Segmentation, revision 49
9. UAX #29: Text Boundaries, revision 9
10. The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 7: Latin
11. U+00E1 Latin Small Letter A with Acute, unicodecharacter.org
12. Latin Extended-B, Unicode 18.0.0 names list

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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