What is '`' character called?

Question

I feel silly for asking this but it isn't like I could google this.

What is the ` character called? In case it doesnt show up, it is the character used for inline code with markdown. Also, on most keyboards, it shares the key with ~.

I like all three answers so I made this a CW instead of accepting

Answer 1

All sorts of things, but in programming mostly the back-quote or backtick,

Answer 2

Grave (pronounced Grahv, not like the synonym for tomb) or Grave accent.

Answer 3

From the Jargon file, the prime nerd reference which really should be an ISO standard :-)

Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; ; grave.

Rare: backprime; backspark; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; opening single quotation mark; quasiquote.

Answer 4

You can use Unicode table to find name of the symbol. There are utilities which let you search it, like gucharmap. It gives U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT for this symbol.

Answer 5

This answer or this answer provides a good definition.

In laymen's terms "no-shift-tilde" is also useful in PHP for keeping mySQL statements from crashing on single quotes on the table name.

SELECT * from `the_table_name` WHERE id=1 // best practice

For some reason certain PHP servers will choke on this:

SELECT * from 'the_table_name' WHERE id=1 // not preferred method

This normally works, but doesn't pass nice in strings:

SELECT * from "the_table_name" WHERE id=1 // how to escape this string?

Other than that, I don't use it much.