Acute accent

The acute accent (/əˈkjuːt/), ◌́, is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.

[1] The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch.

In the romanization of Macedonian, ⟨ǵ⟩ and ⟨ḱ⟩ represent the Cyrillic letters ⟨ѓ⟩ (Gje) and ⟨ќ⟩ (Kje), which stand for palatal or alveolo-palatal consonants, though ⟨gj⟩ and ⟨kj⟩ (or ⟨đ⟩ and ⟨ć⟩) are more commonly used for this purpose[citation needed].

The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs in the following languages: As with other diacritical marks, a number of (usually French) loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent as used in the original language: these include attaché, blasé, canapé, cliché, communiqué, café, décor, déjà vu, détente, élite, entrée, exposé, mêlée, fiancé, fiancée, papier-mâché, passé, pâté, piqué, plié, repoussé, résumé, risqué, sauté, roué, séance, naïveté and touché.

Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending é or ée, as in these examples, where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation.

Acute accents are sometimes added to loanwords where a final e is not silent, for example, maté from Spanish mate, the Maldivian capital Malé, saké from Japanese sake, and Pokémon from the Japanese compound for pocket monster, the last three from languages which do not use the Roman alphabet, and where transcriptions do not normally use acute accents.

OpenType tried to solve this problem by giving language-sensitive glyph substitution to designers such that the font would automatically switch between Western ⟨ó⟩ and Polish ⟨ó⟩ based on language settings.

This contradicts the Western typographic tradition which makes designing the acute accent in Chinese typefaces a problem.

Designers approach this problem in 3 ways: either keep the original Western form of going top right (thicker) to bottom left (thinner) (e.g. Arial/Times New Roman), flip the stroke to go from bottom left (thicker) to top right (thinner) (e.g. Adobe HeiTi Std/SimSun), or just make the accents without stroke variation (e.g.

This method was used with typewriters where, when the typist typed an accent, the carriage did not move as usual with the effect that the next letter would be written on the same place on the paper.

A sample extract of Icelandic .
Acute accent in multiple fonts.
Acute accent in multiple computer fonts . Gray letters indicate o kreska in the provided font. Notice that kreska in gray letters are steeper than acute accent in black letters. Also in Adobe HeiTi Std and SimSun, the stroke goes from bottom-left (thicker) to top-right (thinner), showing the rising nature of the tone; however, the acute accent in SimHei is made without variation in thickness.