Acute accent

The acute accent (´, ◌́), is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available.

An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.

The acute accent was first used in French in 1530 by Geoffroy Tory, the royal printer.

The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch. In Modern Greek, a stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is ὀξεῖα (oxeîa, Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as acūta "sharpened".

The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages:

The acute accent marks the height of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages.

A graphically similar, but not identical, mark is indicative of a palatalized sound in several languages.

In Polish, such a mark is known as a kreska ("stroke") and is an integral part of several letters: four consonants and one vowel. When appearing in consonants, it indicates palatalization, similar to the use of the háček in Czech and other Slavic languages (e.g. sześć [ˈʂɛɕt͡ɕ] "six"). However, in contrast to the háček which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the kreska denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the kreska is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center. A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet Łacinka. However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance.