diacritical

Marks modifying letters

Diacritical describes marks added to letters to indicate pronunciation, stress, or meaning.

An accent, umlaut, or cedilla is a diacritical mark: The diacritical marks in résumé and naïve are often dropped in English.

The shorter form diacritic works as both noun and adjective.

orthography

accent mark

Pronunciation guide symbol

umlautDouble-dot diacritical mark
cedillaMark softening consonants
tildeWavy diacritical mark

circumflex · acute · grave · breve · diaeresis · dot · ring · stroke · horn · hook

typographic

combining character

Glyph attaching to another

fontCharacter style set
typographyArranging letters for display
typesetArrange text for printing

kerning · glyph · encoding · rendering · display · typeface · character set · ASCII · text · composition

phonetic

pronunciation

Manner of speaking words

phonemeMinimal distinctive sound unit
vowelUnobstructed speech sound
consonantIn agreement with

tone · nasalization · aspiration · stress mark · IPA · phonology · articulation · vocalization · syllable · length

Categories

DIA- wordsdiameter, diagonal, diagram, dialogue, diamond
small marksdot, speck, spot, fleck, pip
linguisticslinguistics, phoneme, phonemes, morpheme, morphemes
philologyphilology, etymology, critical edition, collation, emendation

Opposites

distinguishing function

diacriticalundiscriminating

Not making distinctions

indiscriminating · nondistinctive · ambiguous · unmarked · indistinguishable

base vs. modifying elements

diacriticalunaccented

Not emphasized in speech

unmarked · unmodified · plain · alphabetic · bare

Phrases

diacritical markSymbol modifying letter pronunciation

Family

diacritic, diacritics, diacritical mark

Familiarity: Top 500,000
Profile: Used worldwide · Timeless · Rated G