Latin Small Letter E with Acute

About this character

U+00E9 is the lowercase Latin letter e with an acute accent. It appears in dozens of European orthographies. In French it marks the close-mid front vowel /e/ as in café, été, répondre. In Spanish and Italian it carries lexical stress. In Portuguese, Catalan, and Czech it distinguishes vowel quality or tone. In Hungarian it lengthens the vowel: e and é are different phonemes. Vietnamese and Yoruba use it on top of a tone diacritic. It is also the most common non-ASCII letter in English-language loanwords like résumé, fiancée, and née.

The character has two valid Unicode representations. The precomposed form is the single codepoint U+00E9 — what you almost always want, and what the keyboard produces. The decomposed form is the two-codepoint sequence U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E followed by U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT. Both render identically. They are not equal under naive byte comparison: U+00E9 is two bytes in UTF-8 (C3 A9); e + combining acute is three bytes (65 CC 81). This is the canonical reason Unicode normalisation exists. The macOS HFS+ filesystem stored filenames in NFD (decomposed), most other systems use NFC (precomposed), and Git on a Mac has been known to think two identical-looking filenames are different files because one was decomposed and the other was not.

When building search, deduplication, login, or filename-handling code, always normalise to a single form before comparing. JavaScript: str.normalize('NFC'). Python: unicodedata.normalize('NFC', s). The normalization guide covers the four normalisation forms and when each is the right choice.

From the Unicode data

Its uppercase form is U+00C9 É.

It is precomposed. Under NFD it decomposes into U+0065 e + U+0301 ◌́, and NFC recombines that sequence into this single codepoint, so both spellings are canonically equivalent and should compare equal after normalization. See the normalization guide.