Accent Marks: Grave and Acute

Italian uses two written accent marks: the grave accent (à, è, ì, ò, ù) and the acute accent (é, and very rarely ó). They mark final-syllable stress in words of two or more syllables (città, caffè, perché) and disambiguate certain monosyllables that would otherwise be homographs (è "is" vs e "and", sì "yes" vs si "reflexive").

The system is small but every learner gets some part of it wrong. Writing perchè with a grave accent is a real spelling error in Italian — the word is perché with an acute. Writing e without the accent for the verb form è changes "is" into the conjunction "and". Writing po without the apostrophe for po' (a little) is wrong because po' is an apostrophe, not an accent. This page lays out which accent goes where, why the rules are what they are, and the small set of exceptions.

1. What an accent mark does

In Italian, an accent mark on a vowel does two jobs simultaneously:

1. It tells you the word is stressed on that vowel (when the word is final-stressed).
2. It tells you the vowel quality of e or o — grave for the open variant (è, ò), acute for the closed variant (é).

The vowels a, i, u have only one quality each, so the accent on those (à, ì, ù) only marks stress — there's no quality choice to be made. The grave is always used for stressed final a, i, u.

The vowels e and o each have two pronunciations — open and closed — and the choice of accent records which one. So when you see caffè with a grave, the è is the open vowel /ɛ/. When you see perché with an acute, the é is the closed vowel /e/. This is the deeper logic of the system: the accent mark is doing pronunciation work, not just marking stress.

In practice, the closed o (acute ó) is nearly nonexistent in standard Italian spelling — there are very few common words with stressed final closed o, and those that exist are usually written without an accent or appear only in dictionaries.

2. Final-stressed words: when the accent is mandatory

When a word of two or more syllables is stressed on the final vowel, Italian writes the accent on that vowel. The accent is obligatory — the word città without the accent is a spelling error, just as writing "Im" for "I'm" is in English.

Words with grave accent (the majority)

Words with acute accent — almost exclusively the -ché family

The acute é is almost exclusively reserved for words ending in -ché (the conjunction che preceded by another element). The closed quality of the final e in this set is consistent across all members.

A few standalone words with acute accent

Outside the -ché family, only a small number of words take the acute:

That's effectively the entire acute-accent inventory for stressed final vowels in standard Italian. Everything else uses the grave.

3. Monosyllables with mandatory accent (disambiguation)

Italian has a small set of one-syllable words that take an accent not because of stress (monosyllables don't need stress marking) but to distinguish them from identically-spelled but grammatically different words. This is purely an orthographic disambiguation tool.

The pattern: the accented form is the one most learners get wrong. Italian grammar is brutal here — e without an accent really is a different word from è with one, and the spelling rule is non-negotiable. Software autocorrect systems frequently fail to add these accents, so getting them right is a sign of careful Italian writing.

Monosyllables that do NOT take an accent

A common over-correction is to add accents to monosyllables that don't need them. The following are unaccented in standard Italian:

• qui (here), qua (here) — both unaccented, even though stressed.
• fa (he does, third-person of fare) — unaccented (older texts sometimes wrote fà; modern style drops it).
• sto, sta (forms of stare) — unaccented (older spelling sometimes used the accent; current standard does not).
• do (I give) — unaccented.
• no (no) — unaccented.
• tre (three) — unaccented (but compounds like ventitré do take the accent because they are no longer monosyllables).

4. The biggest mistakes around accents

Mistake A: writing perchè with a grave

The single most common Italian spelling error — even among native speakers in informal contexts — is writing perché with a grave accent (perchè). It is widespread enough that you'll see it on signs, in social media posts, even in older newspaper texts. But the standard, the dictionaries, and every Italian grammar agree: perché has the acute accent. Writing perchè is a spelling error.

The reason it matters: the grave/acute distinction in Italian encodes the open/closed vowel quality. Perché ends in /ke/ (closed e), so the acute is correct. Writing perchè would imply /kɛ/ (open e), which would be a different pronunciation. Even though many Italians don't actually distinguish these vowels in speech, the spelling rule is fixed.

Mistake B: writing e for è

Equally common: writing e without the accent when you mean è (is). In texting and informal writing this is so frequent that it almost reads as normal — but in any formal context (essays, work emails, signs, books), it is wrong.

Mistake C: writing qual è with an apostrophe

Another famous trap: the question phrase "qual è...?" ("which is...?") is written without an apostrophe, even though qual ends in a consonant cluster that looks like it should be elided. The form qual is an apocopation of quale — an old dropping of the final e — not an elision before a vowel. Apocopation does not take the apostrophe; only elision does.

Mistake D: confusing po with po'

The word po' (meaning "a little") is written with an apostrophe, not an accent. It is a truncated form of poco — the final -co has been dropped, and the apostrophe records that truncation. It is not pò with a grave accent.

For more on the apostrophe (and its difference from the accent), see Elision and the Apostrophe.

Mistake E: skipping the accent on -tré numerals

The numbers ventitré (23), trentatré (33), quarantatré (43), and so on are written with an acute accent on the final é. Skipping the accent — writing ventitre — is wrong.

The bare number tre (three) does not take an accent — it's monosyllabic and unambiguous. But ventitré, trentatré, etc. are multisyllabic words ending in a final-stressed vowel, so the accent is required.

5. Why grave on most, acute on -ché?

The distribution of grave vs acute traces back to the open/closed quality of the final vowel. The grave accent (à, è, ì, ò, ù) was historically used for "low" or "open" vowel sounds, the acute (é, ó) for "high" or "closed" sounds.

For a, i, u, there's only one quality, so the choice doesn't matter — convention settled on grave for all three.

For e and o, the choice does encode the open/closed distinction. Caffè has the open /ɛ/, hence grave è. Perché has the closed /e/, hence acute é. Però has the open /ɔ/, hence grave ò.

The reason there are so few words with acute é (and almost none with acute ó) is that stressed final closed e and o are rare in Italian. The -ché family inherits its closed e from the Latin etymology of the che element and the historical pronunciation; the -tré numerals work the same way. Outside these specific etymological pockets, final stressed e and o tend to be open and take the grave.

A handful of dictionary-marked words use acute ó — bótte (barrel) for example — but in normal text these distinctions are simply not written. The acute é of perché and the few other words listed above is the only acute you reliably encounter in everyday Italian text.

6. Why does Italian mark stress at all?

Italian's stress-marking system is much more limited than Spanish's. Spanish marks every irregular stress with an accent: teléfono, música, cárcel, así. Italian marks only final-syllable stress of multisyllabic words plus a handful of monosyllables.

The reason is historical: the modern accent system was codified to resolve genuine ambiguities, not to teach pronunciation. The cases where Italian writes the accent are exactly the cases where the spelling would otherwise mislead — citta would be guessed as penultimate (cit-TA being a possible reading), so the accent forces the correct cit-TÀ. Similarly, e "and" and è "is" need to be distinguished in writing.

Words like telefono and abito do not receive accent marks even though they break the penultimate default, because the system was not designed to teach speakers where the stress falls — it was designed to record what the speaker already knows. This is why Italian dictionaries use additional internal accent marks (ÀBI-to, PARLA-no) that are absent in normal text.

7. Quick reference: when to write what

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• Italian uses two accent marks: the grave (à, è, ì, ò, ù) and the acute (é, very rarely ó).
• Accents mark final-syllable stress in multisyllabic words. The spelling without the accent is wrong.
• The grave is the default: città, caffè, però, virtù, lunedì. Most final-stressed words take grave.
• The acute is reserved for closed e: almost exclusively -ché words (perché, poiché, finché, benché, affinché, sicché) plus né, sé, and the -tré numerals.
• A small set of monosyllables take an accent for disambiguation: è/e, sì/si, né/ne, sé/se, là/la, lì/li, dà/da, dì/di, tè/te, ché/che.
• Common errors: writing perchè (wrong, should be perché); writing e for è; writing qual'è with an apostrophe (wrong — qual è is two words, no apostrophe); writing pò (wrong, should be po' with an apostrophe).
• The accent encodes vowel quality as well as stress: grave è/ò are open; acute é/ó are closed.

For the apostrophe (a different mark with a different role), see Elision and the Apostrophe. For where stress falls in unmarked words, see Word Stress Rules. For the open/closed vowel distinction itself, see The Seven Vowel Sounds.