Á, á (a-acute) is a letter of the Blackfoot, Czech, Dutch, Faroese, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Kazakh, Lakota, Navajo, Occitan, Portuguese, Sámi, Slovak, Spanish, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Western Apache languages as a variant of the letter a. It is sometimes confused with à; e.g. "5 apples á $1", which is more commonly written as "5 apples à $1" (meaning "5 apples at 1 dollar each").

Usage in various languages[edit]


In Chinese pinyin á is the yángpíng tone (陽平/阳平 "high-rising tone") of "a".


In Dutch, the Á is used to put emphasis on an "a", either in a long "a" form like in háár ("hair"), or in a short form like in kán (the verb "can").


In Irish, á is called a fada ("long a"), pronounced [ɑː] and appears in words such as slán ("goodbye"). It is the only diacritic used in Modern Irish, since the decline of the dot above many letters in the Irish language. Fada is only used on vowel letters i.e. á, é, í, ó, ú. It symbolises a lengthening of the vowel.

Czech, Hungarian, and Slovak[edit]

Á is the 2nd letter of the Czech, Hungarian and Slovak languages and represents /aː/.


Á is the 2nd letter of the Faroese alphabet and represents /ɔ/ or /ɔaː/.


Á is the second letter of the Icelandic alphabet and represents /au̯/ (as in "ow").


Á is the second letter of the Kazakh Latin alphabet and represents /æ/.


In Portuguese, á is used to mark a stressed /a/ in words whose stressed syllable is in an abnormal location within the word, as in (there) and rápido (rapid, fast). If the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, the acute accent is not used. Á /a/ contrasts with â, pronounced /ɐ/.

Scottish Gaelic[edit]

Á was once used in Scottish, but has now been largely superseded by à. It can still be seen in certain writings, but it is no longer used in standard orthography.


In Spanish, á is an accented letter, pronounced just the way a is. Both á and a sound like /a/. The accent indicates the stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns. It can also be used to "break up" a diphthong or to avoid what would otherwise be homonyms, although this does not happen with á, because a is a strong vowel and usually does not become a semivowel in a diphthong. See Diacritic and Acute accent for more details.


In the Vietnamese alphabet, á is the sắcling tone (high-rising tone) of a.


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. The acute accent on a is often found in verbal nouns and borrowed words, for example, casáu [kaˈsaɨ̯, kaˈsai̯ ] "to hate", caniatáu [kanjaˈtaɨ̯, kanjaˈtai̯] "to allow", carafán [karaˈvan] "caravan".

Character mappings[edit]

Character Á á
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 193 U+00C1 225 U+00E1
UTF-8 195 129 C3 81 195 161 C3 A1
Numeric character reference &#193; &#xC1; &#225; &#xE1;
Named character reference &Aacute; &aacute;
EBCDIC family 101 65 69 45
ISO 8859-1/2/3/4/9/10/14/15/16 193 C1 225 E1

See also[edit]