English terms with diacritical marks

Though limited, the following diacritical marks in English may be encountered, particularly for marking in poetry:[5]

• the acute accent (née) and grave accent (English poetry marking, changèd), modifying vowels or marking stresses
• the circumflex (entrepôt), borrowed from French
• the diaeresis (Zoë), indicating a second syllable in two consecutive vowels
• the tittle, the dot found on the regular small i and small j, is removed when another diacritic is required
• the macron (English poetry marking, lēad pronounced /liːd/, not /lɛd/), lengthening vowels, as in Māori; or indicating omitted n or m (in pre-Modern English, both in print and in handwriting).
• the breve (English poetry marking, drŏll pronounced /drɒl/, not /droʊl/), shortening vowels.
• the umlaut (über), altering Germanic vowels
• the cedilla (soupçon), in French, Portuguese and in Catalan it is a softening c, indicating 's-' not 'k-' pronunciation
• the tilde (Señor, João), in Spanish indicating palatalised n, and Portuguese indicating nasal a and o (although in Spanish and most source languages, the tilde is not considered a diacritic over the letter n but rather as an integral part of the distinct letter ñ; in Portuguese the sound is represented by "nh")

In representing European personal names, anthroponyms, and place names, toponyms, the following are often encountered:

• the háček (as in Karel Čapek), often also called the haček in English (adapted from "háček", the Czech name [note 1]), as Č/č, Š/š, Ř/ř (only in Czech), Ž/ž broadly turns "c" "s" "r" "z" into English "ch" "sh" "ř[7]" "zh" sounds respectively, and Ď/ď, Ľ/ľ (only in Slovak), Ň/ň and Ť/ť turn "d" "l" "n" and "t" into palatal "dy" "ly" "ny" and "ty" sounds. In most fonts the caron looks like an apostrophe sitting inside the Slovak capital L, as "Ľ", but in fact is only another form of caron.
• the Polish crossed Ł and nasal ogonek (as in Lech Wałęsa) a "dark L", nearer an English "W", and a nasal "e", nearer English "en" (in Polish called "crossed Ł" or eł[note 2] and Polish pronunciation: [ɔˈɡɔnɛk], "lit. little tail")
• the Croatian and Serbian crossed Đ (as in Franjo Tuđman or Zoran Đinđić), equivalent to the Cyrillic letter Dje
• the Maltese crossed Ħ (as in the Ħal- town prefix, Ħal Far Industrial Estate), a hard H
• the Danish and Norwegian crossed Ø (as in Galdhøpiggen); the front rounded O, which is written with an umlaut in Swedish and German
• the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish over-ring Å (as in the Åland Islands), the å vowel sound
• the Romanian Ș (as in Chișinău), the voiceless postalveolar fricative

For a more complete list see diacritical marks.

In some cases, the diacritic is not borrowed from any foreign language but is purely of English origin. The second of two vowels in a hiatus can be marked with a diaeresis (or "tréma") – as in words such as coöperative, daïs and reëlect – but its use has become less common, sometimes being replaced by the use of a hyphen.[11] The New Yorker[12][13][14] and MIT Technology Review under Jason Pontin have maintained such usage as house styles.

The diaeresis mark is also in rare cases used over a single vowel to show that it is pronounced separately (as in Brontë). It is often omitted in printed works because the sign is missing on modern keyboards.[15]

The acute and grave accents are occasionally used in poetry and lyrics: the acute to indicate stress overtly where it might be ambiguous (rébel vs. rebél) or nonstandard for metrical reasons (caléndar); the grave to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced (warnèd, parlìament).

Non-English loanwords enter the English language by a process of naturalisation, or specifically anglicisation, which is carried out mostly unconsciously (a similar process occurs in all other languages). During this process there is a tendency for accents and other diacritics that were present in the donor language to be dropped (for example French hôtel and French rôle becoming "hotel" and "role" respectively in English, or French à propos, which lost both the accent and space to become English "apropos").[16]

In many cases, imported words can be found in print in both their accented and unaccented versions. Since modern dictionaries are mostly descriptive and no longer prescribe outdated forms, they increasingly list unaccented forms, though some dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, do not list the unaccented variants of particular words (e.g., soupçon).

Words that retain their accents often do so to help indicate pronunciation (e.g. frappé, naïve, soufflé), or to help distinguish them from an unaccented English word (e.g. exposé, résumé, rosé). Technical terms or those associated with specific fields (especially cooking or musical terms) are less likely to lose their accents (such as the French soupçon, façade and entrée).

Some Spanish words with the Spanish letter ñ have been naturalised by substituting English ny (e.g. Spanish cañón is now usually English canyon, Spanish piñón is now usually English pinyon pine). Certain words like piñata, jalapeño and quinceañera are usually kept intact. In many instances the ñ is replaced with the plain letter n. In words of German origin, the letters with umlauts ä, ö, ü may be written ae, oe, ue.[17] This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for Führer. However, today umlauts are usually either left out, with no e following the previous letter, or included as written in German (as in The New York Times or The Economist). Zurich is an exception since it is not a case of a "dropped umlaut", but is a genuine English exonym, used also in French (from Latin Turicum)—therefore it may be seen written without the umlaut even alongside other German and Swiss names that retain the umlaut.[18]

Diacritics are used in the names of some English-speaking people:

• British: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë (and other members of the Brontë family), Noël Coward, Zoë Wanamaker, Zoë Ball, Emeli Sandé, John le Carré
• American: Beyoncé Knowles, Chloë Grace Moretz, Chloë Sevigny, Renée Fleming, Renée Zellweger, Zoë Baird, Donté Stallworth, John C. Frémont, Robert M. Gagné, Roxanne Shanté, Janelle Monáe, Jhené Aiko
• Australian: Renée Geyer, Zoë Badwi

The early days of metal type printing quickly faced problems of not just simple diacritical marks for English, and accents for French and German, but also musical notation (for sheet music printing) and Greek and Hebrew alphabets (for Bible printing).[22] However problems with representation of diacritical marks continued even in scholarly publishing and dissertations up to the word processor era.[23] Mechanical typewriter keyboards manufactured for English-speaking countries seldom include diacritics.

The first generation of word processors also had character set limitations,[24] and confusion due to typesetting convention was exacerbated in the character coded environment due to limitations of the ASCII character set.[25]

• Lists of English words by country or language of origin
• List of French expressions in English
• List of German expressions in English