The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a usually silent vowel is pronounced to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word that ends with -ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: look-ed). In this capacity, it can also distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, learned , from the adjective learnèd (for example, "a very learnèd man").
