É
É, é (e-acute) is a letter of the Latin alphabet. It is found in Catalan, Czech, Danish, English, French, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Kashubian, Luxembourgish, Occitan, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Welsh languages, as a variant of the letter "e". In English, it may be observed as a pronunciation aid in loanwords (e.g., résumé from French) or romanizations (e.g., Pokémon from Japanese). This is also used in Dutch and Navajo.
É or é is also used for /ɛ/ with a rising tone in pinyin, the Chinese language roman-alphabet transcription system. It is also used in Indonesian dictionaries to denote /e/, in contrast with E, e /ə/.
Usage in various languages
Czech and Slovak
É is the 5th letter of the Czech alphabet and Slovak alphabet, and represents /ɛː/.
Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish
In Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, the letter "é" is used to indicate that a terminal syllable with the vowel e is stressed, and is often written out only when it changes the meaning. See Acute accent for a more detailed description.
Dutch
Similarly to English, é is respected when writing foreign languages; mainly from French. It is also used to differentiate the article "een" which is equivalent to either "a" or "an" in English and "één" which is the number one. It is also used to add visual stress on words in the same way English might use italics. In the Dutch language, some people use "hé" as a greeting, like "hey" or "hi".
English
In English, the e-acute has some uses, mostly in words of French origin, such as résumé, fiancée, and sauté, and names such as Beyoncé, Jon Benét, and Théo. Pokémon, the media franchise owned by Japanese corporation Nintendo, has also come into common use. Some Spanish words such as Puntapié or Toreé have some use in English. Also, Padmé Amidala in Star Wars has an e-acute in her name.
French
The letter é (pronounced /e/) contrasts with è (which is pronounced /ɛ/) and is widely used in French.
Hungarian
É is the 9th letter of the Hungarian alphabet and represents /eː/.
Icelandic
É is the 7th letter of the Icelandic alphabet and represents /jɛː/.
Irish
In Irish the acute accent (fada) marks a long vowel; thus é is pronounced /eː/.
Italian
É is a variant of E carrying an acute accent; it represents an /e/ carrying the tonic accent. It is used only if it's the last letter of the word, except in dictionaries or when a different pronunciation may affect the meaning of a word. Examples: perché ("why"/"because", pronounced [perˈke]) and pésca ("fishing", [ˈpeska]), to be compared with caffè ("coffee", [kafˈfɛ]) and pèsca ("peach", [ˈpɛska]), which have a grave accent.
Kashubian
É is the 8th letter of the Kashubian alphabet and represents /ɛ/. It also represents [ej] in some dialects, and represents [i]/[ɨ] in area between Puck and Kartuzy.
Portuguese
In Portuguese, é is used to mark a stressed /ɛ/ in words whose stressed syllable is in an unpredictable location within the word, as in "péssimo" (very bad). Where the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, the acute accent is not used. É /ɛ/ contrasts with ê, pronounced /e/. "É" is also the third-person singular conjugation of the verb "ser" (to be): ela é bonita (she is pretty).
Spanish
In Spanish, é is an accented letter, pronounced just like "e" is. Both é and e sound like /e/. The accent indicates the stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns, as in "Éxtasis" or "Época". See Diacritic and Acute accent for more details.
Scottish Gaelic
É was once used in Scottish Gaelic, but has now been largely superseded by "è". It can still be seen in certain writings, but it is no longer used in standard orthography.
Welsh
In Welsh, word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final (short) vowel is through the use of the acute accent, often found on e in borrowed words, for example, personél [pɛrsɔˈnɛl] "personnel", sigarét [sɪɡaˈrɛt] "cigarette", ymbarél [əmbaˈrɛl] "umbrella".
Character mappings
| Character | É | é | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH ACUTE | LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 201 | U+00C9 | 233 | U+00E9 |
| UTF-8 | 195 137 | C3 89 | 195 169 | C3 A9 |
| Numeric character reference | É | É | é | é |
| Named character reference | É | é | ||
| ISO 8859-1/2/3/4/9/10/13/14/15/16 | 201 | C9 | 233 | E9 |
| Mac OS Roman | 131 | 83 | 142 | 8E |
Microsoft Windows users can type an "é" by pressing Alt+130 or Alt+0233 on the numeric pad of the keyboard. "É" can be typed by pressing Alt+144 or Alt+0201. Users can also type "é" by pressing ´ followed by an E or "É" by ´ then ⇧ Shift+E.
On US International and UK English keyboard layouts, users can type the acute accent letter "é" by typing AltGR+E. This method can also be applied to many other acute accented letters which do not appear on the standard US English keyboard layout.
In Microsoft Word, users can press Ctrl+' (apostrophe), then E or ⇧ Shift+E for "é" or "É".
On Mac OS X, users can press ⌥ Option+E, then E or ⇧ Shift+E for "é" or "É".
Using a compose key, users can hold Compose and press ' (apostrophe) E for "é" or Compose ' (apostrophe) ⇧ Shift+E for "É".
On a standard Android, Windows Mobile, or iOS keyboard, users can hold the E key until special characters appear, slide to the é, and release.