When do I write a or à in French?

Write a when it's the verb avoir (il a faim) and à when it's the preposition (je vais à Paris). The quick test is to swap in avait: if the sentence still works, it's a. Leaving the accent off isn't a harmless typo here, since the two are different words.

Is it voila or voilà in English?

Both are accepted. English dictionaries list voilà and give voila as a variant, so the accent is optional in English text and still correct if you keep it. What's never right is viola, which is the instrument.

Why do words ending in à turn into Ã?

Something trimmed or cleaned up whitespace after the text was garbled, and the second half of à's garble is a non-breaking space, so voilà ends up as voilÃ and the usual encode-and-decode repair can't reverse it. For French text, which never uses Ã, fix those spots directly: in Python, `re.sub(r'Ã(?:\xa0|(?=\s|$))', 'à', s)`.

Why does Alt+224 give α on one PC and Ó on another?

Use Alt+0224 instead, which gives à on every Windows machine, or Alt+133, which works under both DOS code pages. The short code changes from PC to PC because it follows the machine's DOS code page, 437 on US systems and 850 on most Western European ones, and neither has à at 224.

ASCII 224

Lowercase a with grave accentGreek small alpha

ASCII 224 is à on Windows and α in old DOS.

à (Small A with Grave) is byte 224 in Windows-1252, Unicode U+00E0. French uses it in à, déjà and voilà, and Italian in città. Regular expressions trip on it in JavaScript. There \w only matches ASCII letters, digits and the underscore, even with the u flag, so à counts as a non-word character, and /\bvoilà\b/.test('voilà') returns false because no word boundary exists after the final à. Use Unicode property escapes such as \p{L} with the u flag instead. Python's \w is Unicode-aware by default, so the same pattern works there. Old DOS had à at 133. In UTF-8 it's C3 A0, which misreads as Ã plus a non-breaking space. The HTML entity is à.

α (Alpha) is byte 224 in code page 437, the original IBM PC character set, and maps to Unicode U+03B1. It opens a row of Greek letters and math symbols from 224 to 239 (α, Γ, π, Σ, Ω and a few more), which isn't a full Greek alphabet, so Greek text needed its own DOS code page, 737. Two lookalikes are worth keeping apart: ∝ (U+221D) means proportional to, and ɑ (U+0251) is the Latin alpha of phonetics, and neither matches α in search. Code page 850 replaced most of this row with accented letters, starting with Ó here. In UTF-8, α is CE B1, and the HTML entity is α.

Latin LetterGreek Letter

Technical Details

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 224 is à.
       Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */
    printf("\u00E0\n");   /* UTF-8: C3 A0 */

    unsigned char b = 224;         /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */
    printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b);    /* 224 0xE0 */
    return 0;
}

Code Example

</>

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    /* Byte 224 is α only on a console using code page 437
       (chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal the
       lone byte 0xE0 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */
    putchar(224);

    /* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xE0 is -32.
       Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */
    char c = (char)224;
    unsigned char u = 224;
    printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u);   /* -32 224 */

    /* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */
    printf("\u03B1\n");          /* CE B1 */
    return 0;
}

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 0224 on the numeric keypad, with Num Lock on. The leading zero picks the Windows code page. Alt+133, without the zero, types it too. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 00E0 and press Alt+X.
Mac: Press Option+`, then a.
Linux: In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type e0, then Space. With a Compose key set up, press Compose, backtick, a.
Phone: Long-press a and pick à.

How to Type It

Windows: Hold Alt and type 224 on the numeric keypad, with no leading zero. US PCs insert α, but PCs set to code page 850, common in Western Europe, insert Ó. No numeric keypad? In Word, type 03B1 and press Alt+X.
Mac: Press Control+Command+Space to open the Character Viewer, then search for "greek small letter alpha".
Linux: In GNOME, or any desktop running IBus, press Ctrl+Shift+U, type 3b1, then Space.
Phone: Add the Greek keyboard in your phone's keyboard settings and type α there, or tap the character at the top of this page to copy it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Write a when it's the verb avoir (il a faim) and à when it's the preposition (je vais à Paris). The quick test is to swap in avait: if the sentence still works, it's a. Leaving the accent off isn't a harmless typo here, since the two are different words.
Both are accepted. English dictionaries list voilà and give voila as a variant, so the accent is optional in English text and still correct if you keep it. What's never right is viola, which is the instrument.
Something trimmed or cleaned up whitespace after the text was garbled, and the second half of à's garble is a non-breaking space, so voilà ends up as voilÃ and the usual encode-and-decode repair can't reverse it. For French text, which never uses Ã, fix those spots directly: in Python, `re.sub(r'Ã(?:\xa0|(?=\s|$))', 'à', s)`.
Use Alt+0224 instead, which gives à on every Windows machine, or Alt+133, which works under both DOS code pages. The short code changes from PC to PC because it follows the machine's DOS code page, 437 on US systems and 850 on most Western European ones, and neither has à at 224.

Frequently Asked Questions

Use Alt+0224 instead, which gives à on every Windows machine, or Alt+133, which works under both DOS code pages. The short code changes from PC to PC because it follows the machine's DOS code page, 437 on US systems and 850 on most Western European ones, and neither has à at 224.

ASCII 224

Lowercase a with grave accentGreek small alpha

ASCII 224 is à on Windows and α in old DOS.

Latin Letter

Greek Letter

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* On Windows (code page 1252) byte 224 is à.

Modern terminals expect UTF-8, so print the code point, not the byte. */

printf("\u00E0\n"); /* UTF-8: C3 A0 */

unsigned char b = 224; /* the raw Windows-1252 byte */

printf("%d 0x%02X\n", b, b); /* 224 0xE0 */

return 0;

}

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {

/* Byte 224 is α only on a console using code page 437

(chcp 437 on Windows, or DOSBox). On a UTF-8 terminal the

lone byte 0xE0 is invalid and prints as garbage, often �. */

putchar(224);

/* char is signed on x86, so a plain char holding 0xE0 is -32.

Use unsigned char when you compare or index by byte value. */

char c = (char)224;

unsigned char u = 224;

printf("\n%d %d\n", c, u); /* -32 224 */

/* Portable: print the Unicode character as UTF-8 instead. */

printf("\u03B1\n"); /* CE B1 */

return 0;

}