What is the name of the tick on the back? - briefly
The character is called a backtick, also known as the grave accent (`).
What is the name of the tick on the back? - in detail
The symbol placed at the upper‑left of the keyboard and used to enclose literals in many programming languages is called the grave accent. It is also referred to as the backquote, backtick, or grave. In Unicode it is U+0060 (`). The character’s primary visual form is a small diagonal stroke opening toward the right.
In computing contexts the glyph serves several functions:
- Command‑line shells – encloses command substitution in Bash, Zsh, and other Unix shells.
- Markup languages – marks inline code in Markdown, reStructuredText, and similar formats.
- Programming languages – delimits template literals in JavaScript, raw string literals in Python (preceded by
r), and identifiers in MySQL. - Version control – appears in diff output to indicate removed lines when prefixed with a tilde (
~).
Keyboard placement varies: on US QWERTY layouts the key shares a position with the tilde (~) and is accessed without the Shift modifier; on many international layouts it may be located to the left of the numeral 1 or above the Tab key.
Historically the glyph originates from the acute accent used in medieval manuscripts to indicate omitted letters. Its adoption in typewriters and early computer terminals preserved the shape while assigning new syntactic roles.
When encoding text, the character can be represented as ` in HTML, \`` in escape sequences, or\u0060` in Unicode escapes. Proper handling ensures compatibility across fonts, editors, and parsers that treat the symbol as a distinct punctuation mark rather than an apostrophe.