À, à (a-grave) is a letter of the Catalan, Emilian-Romagnol, French, Galician, Italian, Maltese, Occitan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, and Welsh languages consisting of the letter A of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and a grave accent. À is also used in Pinyin transliteration. In most languages, it represents the vowel a. This letter is also a letter in Taos to indicate a mid tone. In accounting or invoices, à abbreviates "at a rate of": "5 apples à $1" (one dollar each). That usage is based upon the French preposition à and has evolved into the at sign (@). Sometimes, it is part of a surname: Thomas à Kempis, Mary Anne à Beckett. Usage in various languages Emilian-Romagnol À is used in Emilian to represent short stressed [a], e.g. Bolognese dialect sacàtt [saˈkatː] "sack". French The grave accent is used in the French language to differentiate homophones, e.g. the third person conjugation of a "[he/she/it] has" and à "at, in, and to". Portuguese À is used in Portuguese to represent a contraction of the feminine singular definite article A with the preposition A: Ele foi à praia. He went to the beach. Character mappings Microsoft Windows users can type an "à" by pressing or on the numeric pad of the keyboard. "À" can be typed by pressing . On a Mac, you hold , and then let go and type . Latin letters with diacritics Polish letters with diacritics