The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using the Latin alphabet, such as Mohawk and Yoruba, and with non-Latin writing systems such as the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and the Bopomofo or Zhuyin Fuhao semi-syllabary. It has no single meaning, but can indicate pitch, stress, or other features. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available. For less-used and compound diacritics, a combining character facility is available. A free-standing version of the symbol, commonly called a backtick, also exists and has acquired other uses. Uses Pitch The grave accent first appeared in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to mark a lower pitch than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it replaces an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when that word is followed immediately by another word. The grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography. The accent mark was called , the feminine form of the adjective (), meaning "heavy" or "low in pitch." This was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as which then became the English word grave. Stress The grave accent marks the stressed vowels of words in Maltese, Catalan, and Italian. A general rule in Italian is that words that end with stressed , , or must be marked with a grave accent. Words that end with stressed or may bear either an acute accent or a grave accent, depending on whether the final e or o sound is closed or open, respectively. Some examples of words with a final grave accent are ("city"), ("so/then/thus"), ("more"/"plus"), ("Moses"), and ("[he/she/it] brought/carried"). Typists who use a keyboard without accented characters and are unfamiliar with input methods for typing accented letters sometimes use a separate grave accent or even an apostrophe instead of the proper accent character. This is nonstandard but is especially common when typing capital letters: * or * instead of ("[he/she/it] is"). Other mistakes arise from the misunderstanding of truncated and elided words: the phrase ("a little"), which is the truncated version of , may be mistakenly spelled as *. Italian has word pairs where