4 ms·

> What is it? Not sure if you meant this literally, but I've seen it refered to as a back tick. As to what it's for, I have no idea either. I can't recall ev

• chmod775 6y ago
  On a mechanical typewriter you'd have a button that would "revert" the position you'll write to by one character - also known as backspace. So if you pressed backspace followed by "`", you'd give the last character a grave accent. That's my theory for it being called backtick anyways. Nowadays you could configure your input method to make that key give the next character a grave accent
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's called "back" because of the direction it tilts.
  • gerdesj 6y ago
    My mum had a mechanical typewriter and yes it would do that. However English has no formal diacritics. We do have shit loads of borrow words from French and others that do have them. If the back tick on the en_GB keyboard is a sop for the grave accent, then why do we not have an acute accent available as well? or a cedilla for that matter?