The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritical mark used in written Catalan, French, Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), Italian, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, and other languages.
The word grave is derived from the Latin gravis (heavy). In English the word is normally pronounced "grahv", IPA /ɡɹɑːv/, not like grave meaning "serious" or a "tomb." It comes from French, where it is pronounced similarly: accent grave /aksɑ̃ ɡʁav/.