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.
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 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".
Microsoft Windows user's computer 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.
See also
Ye with grave, a Cyrillic letter with a similar glyph.