Backtick

It appears to have been at their May 13–15, 1963 meeting that the CCITT decided that the proposed ISO 7-bit code standard would be suitable for their needs if a lower case alphabet and five diacritical marks, including the grave accent, were added to it.

At the October 29–31 meeting, then, the ISO subcommittee altered the ISO draft to meet the CCITT requirements, replacing the up-arrow and left-arrow with diacriticals, adding diacritical meanings to the apostrophe and quotation mark, and making the number sign a dual for the tilde.

[d] Some early typewriters and ASCII peripherals designed the backtick and apostrophe to be mirror images of each other.

This has style remained in use in certain situations, such as in output generated by some UNIX console programs, rendering of man pages within some environments, and old technical documentation.

[9] In many PC-based computer games in the US and UK, the ` key is used to open the console so the user can execute script commands via its CLI.

[citation needed] This is true for games such as Factorio, Battlefield 3, Half-Life, Halo CE, Quake, Half-Life 2, Blockland, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, Unreal, Counter-Strike, Crysis, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim,[13] Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, RuneScape, and games based on the Quake engine or Source engine.

Typewriter with French (AZERTY) keyboard: à , è , é , ç ù have dedicated keys; the circumflex and diaeresis accents have dead keys.
Spanish typewriter (QWERTY keyboard) with dead keys for acute, circumflex, diaeresis and grave accents.