É

É (minuscule: é), known as E-acute, is a Latin-script character composed of the letter E and an acute accent. In Unicode it is encoded as U+00C9 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH ACUTE and U+00E9 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, and the small letter has the canonical decomposition into the base letter e followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT.¹ The character's function varies by language: it marks a closed vowel quality in French and Italian, a stressed syllable in Spanish, an open vowel in Portuguese, and vowel length in Czech and Irish.^{2 • 3}

Unicode encoding and normalization

Unicode encodes some text elements both as precomposed forms and as combining character sequences, and the precomposed form carries a canonical decomposition that makes the two representations canonically equivalent. For é, the precomposed U+00E9 and the sequence e plus U+0301 are two encodings of the same abstract character, and not all processes are required to respect canonical equivalence; binary string comparison can distinguish canonically equivalent sequences.^{6 • 12} Normalizing a string means consistently picking one of these equivalent encodings, either all composed or all decomposed; normalization form C composes the pair into the single precomposed character, while form D leaves it decomposed.⁶

Systems that cannot handle nonspacing marks can normalize text to precomposed characters, an option that accommodates most modern Latin-based languages.⁷

The acute accent itself is not encoded by function and is not specific to any language. In some languages it marks a distinct letter with a distinct pronunciation, in others a stress, a quantity, or a tone, and the same combining character U+0301 serves all of these uses unless a precomposed character is available.⁸

French

In French, é is the only vowel letter that takes the acute accent, called l'accent aigu. The accent changes the vowel's pronunciation to the closed sound [e], roughly like the vowel of English "ay", in words such as été (summer), école (school), and raffiné (refined).⁴ French accents indicate the quality of the sound rather than intensity: acute é is a closed, tense /e/, while grave è is an open, relaxed /ɛ/.²

The choice between é and è follows a rhythmic logic. The closed /e/ is preferred when the syllable ends in that vowel, as in préféré, while è appears when a following syllable contains a silent e that may be dropped, as in préfère, leaving a pronounced consonant to close the syllable.² The same alternation runs through word families: collège takes a grave accent because the following syllable contains a mute e, while collégial takes an acute because the following syllable has a pronounced vowel.⁹

É also has grammatical and etymological roles. The past participle of all -er verbs ends in é, as in j'ai mangé, and word-initial é usually marks that the Old French or Latin ancestor began with es or s, as in établir from Latin stabilire.⁴ The 1990 spelling rectifications proposed replacing é with è in some contexts to match pronunciation, for example évènement alongside the traditional événement.¹⁰

Italian and other languages

Italian uses the acute accent on é for the closed vowel /e/ and the grave on è for the open /ɛ/, and the accent also marks stress on final syllables. Final-stressed words in -ché take the acute, including perché, poiché, affinché, and finché, along with a few standalone words such as né, sé, and ventitré; nearly all other final-stressed words take the grave.⁵

In Portuguese, é represents the stressed open phoneme /ɛ/, as in café, contrasting with the closed /e/ written without an accent in other positions.³ In Spanish, the acute accent on any vowel, including é, marks the stressed syllable when the stress is unexpected, as in canción.³ In Czech and Hungarian the acute marks vowel length, and in Irish the síneadh fada lengthens the vowel in á, é, í, ó, and ú.³

Related characters

The Latin-1 Supplement block contains the full set of e with single diacritics: è (U+00E8), é (U+00E9), ê (U+00EA), and ë (U+00EB), each with a corresponding capital letter.¹ Combinations of e with two diacritics are encoded further afield, such as Ế (U+1EBE, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND ACUTE), used in Vietnamese, which decomposes to Ê plus the combining acute.¹¹

References

1. The Unicode Standard, Version 17.0, Latin-1 Supplement code chart
2. Pronunciation: 'é' and 'è': acute or grave, which accent should you use? TV5MONDE
3. E with Acute Accent (É é): Copy, Alt Code & Shortcuts, Accent Letters
4. French É – Acute Accent (Accent aigu), Lawless French
5. Accent Marks: Grave and Acute, Italian Grammar, Elon.io
6. FAQ – Normalization, Unicode Consortium
7. The Unicode Standard, Version 12.0, Chapter 5
8. FAQ – Characters and Combining Marks, Unicode Consortium
9. Alternance entre é et è dans les mots de même famille, Banque de dépannage linguistique, OQLF
10. Accents sur le E : accent grave et accent aigu, ORTHOLEXI, Université Côte d'Azur
11. Latin Extended Additional names list, Unicode 18.0.0
12. UAX #15: Unicode Normalization Forms

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

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