It is enough to take a look through Tik Tok, Instagram or WhatsApp to come across texts in which you can read things like “happy birthday”, “I am happy” or “I need little to be happy”. Three ways to write the same word, one correct and two capital misspellings that must be avoided at all costs. A brief review of the general rules of accentuation will be enough to clear up any doubts.

Starting with the most elementary, it should be remembered that words are divided into syllables. A syllable, following the definition of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), is “the unit of the language made up of one or more articulated sounds that are grouped around the one with the greatest sonority, which is usually a vowel. In our case , fe-liz is a word with two syllables or two syllables.

Likewise, all words have a tonic syllable, the one that is pronounced with greater intensity. According to the place that syllable occupies, words are classified as acute, flat and esdrújulas:

The tonic syllable in “feliz”, “fe-liz”, is the last one, so it is an acute word. However, it is not necessary to rush to add the tilde, since the tonic syllable is not always accompanied by a graphic accent. As established by the rules of accentuation, they are written with a tilde:

Happy is an acute word that does not end in a vowel or in -n or -s, so it does not have an accent. Neither happy nor happy exist, they are not terms found in the dictionary.

The adjective happy has several meanings, according to the RAE: “that has happiness”; “that causes happiness”; “that happens or happens with happiness” or “said of a thought, a phrase or an expression: opportune, successful, effective”.

Whoever doubts about how to write happy may be because they are confused with the proper name Félix, which does have an accent because it is a flat word that does not end in a vowel, neither in -n nor in -s.

There may still be those who claim that there is an unusual surname that is spelled Happy, with a graphic accent, especially in some American countries. In this regard, the RAE recalls that proper names and surnames are graphically accentuated according to the rules. “It is not true that proper names can be written in any way, but that they have a spelling set by tradition and are graphically accentuated according to the rules. If a name is incorrectly accented in the registry, it must be corrected”, they point out from the highest authority linguistics.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project