cedillas
Hooks under letters
A cedilla is the small hook-shaped mark placed under a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation.
In English, it appears almost exclusively under the letter c (ç) in words borrowed from French, Portuguese, or Turkish, signaling that the c should be pronounced like an s rather than a k.
Words like façade and soupçon retain their cedillas in careful writing, though many English speakers drop the mark entirely.
Of or from Paris's nation
- PortugueseOf a western Iberian nation
- TurkishOf Anatolia's republic
- CatalanIberian Romance language
- AzerbaijaniRelating to Caspian nation
Albanian · Kurdish · Romanian · façade · garçon · Curaçao · pronunciation · orthography
Symbol modifying letter pronunciation
- characterNature, symbol, or role
- glyphVisual form of character
- hookCurved catching device
- commaPunctuation marking pauses
accent · font · typeface · serif · sans-serif · baseline · descender · kerning
Becoming less firm
- sibilantFricative with hiss quality
- fricativeConsonant with audible friction
- voicelessHaving no voice
- articulationClear vocal expression
allophone · phoneme · assimilation · dental · alveolar · consonant · modification · marker
French
Of or from Paris's nation
- PortugueseOf a western Iberian nation
- TurkishOf Anatolia's republic
- CatalanIberian Romance language
Azerbaijani · Albanian · Kurdish · Romanian · façade · garçon · Curaçao · pronunciation · orthography · spelling
diacritic
Symbol modifying letter pronunciation
comma · accent · font · typeface · serif · sans-serif · baseline · descender · kerning · ligature
softening
Becoming less firm
articulation · allophone · phoneme · assimilation · dental · alveolar · consonant · modification · marker · indicator
- writing rulespunctuation, capitalization, spelling, apostrophes, commas
- charactersprotagonist, antagonist, hero, character, characters
- letter partsascenders, descenders, serifs, stems, strokes