È

Look up è in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

"È" is a letter.

• The letter E with a grave accent.
• In English, the letter è is sometimes used in the past tense 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.
• In Emilian, è is used to represent [ɛː], e.g. lèt [lɛːt] "bed". In Romagnol, it represents [ɛ], e.g. vècc' [vɛtʃː] "old men".
• In French, it always represents a [ɛ] sound of letter e when this is at the end of a syllable.
• 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 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.
• È (è) is also used in Macedonian Latin as an equivalent of the letter ye with grave (Ѐ, ѐ).
• 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".

Key strokes

• Microsoft Windows user's computer can type an "è" by pressing Alt+138 or Alt+0232 on the numeric pad of the keyboard. "È" can be typed by pressing Alt+0200.

See also

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