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é

latin small letter e with acute

Latin Small Letter E with Acute

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é, called e acute or accented e, is an e whose acute mark carries pronunciation or spelling information, not extra emphasis. In French, the accent aigu usually signals a closed e; English keeps it in borrowings such as café and résumé. An identical-looking form may instead contain e plus a separate combining acute.

Text symbol

What é means

In French, it marks a closed e sound.

The sound is roughly the vowel in English “day,” without the glide many English speakers add. The mark belongs to the word's spelling: été (summer) and école (school) are misspelled without it. It is not a standalone message or a way to stress the letter.

Why does French use é?

It began as a printer's pronunciation aid.

Early Old French texts generally left out accents, which made some spellings harder to read. Printing changed that: Aldine printers in Italy used accents before the Estienne printing family in France. In 1530, Robert Estienne first placed the acute over a final closed e in forms such as trempé and beauté. The convention became part of French spelling.

Keep the acute wherever established spelling requires it, especially in formal French.

Adding é for decoration can change a word's spelling or pronunciation.

Part of the collection

é
Letters with Accents
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Who writes é

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Don't confuse it with

2
e
Latin Small Letter E
é vs e: one has the acute mark and one does not. In French, swapping them makes the spelling wrong.

é This is e followed by a separate combining acute. It can look identical to é and is canonically equivalent, but the stored characters differ, which can affect search or text matching.

Questions people ask

1

Why does é show as a box on some devices?

Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.

How to type or find é

Also called
e-acute · e acute
Search it as
accent aigu · accented e · e with accent
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Windows (Word)
⎇Alt+XType 00E9, then AltX to get é.
Windows
⊞Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win .).
macOS
⌃Control+⌘Command+␣SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “latin small letter e with acute”.
Linux
⎈Ctrl+⇧Shift+UType 00e9, then Enter or Space.
HTML
é
CSS
\00E9
KDE Plasma: how to type é
As of 2026, enable Plasma Keyboard and hold e, or set up a Compose key and press Compose, e, apostrophe.
macOS
As of 2026, hold e and choose é from the accent menu; the menu is unavailable in some apps.
Windows: Word and Outlook
As of 2026, press Ctrl' (apostrophe), release the keys, then press e.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
é
HTML hex
é
CSS content
content: "\00E9";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%C3%A9
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
2
UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

1

Latin letters1,379 symbols

ABCDEFGHIJKL