Diacritics are marks added to letters — accents, graves, cedillas, umlauts, over dots, under dots, and more — and are very handy to know about — especially if you’re including terms or phrases from a foreign language in an e-version of your story or report.
Examples include déjà, café, résumé, Françoise, bitte schön, Sûreté . . .
For one, it shows respect for the language — and prevents confusion arising as to what you mean . . .??
Okay, okay, yeah, it’s pretty rare you’ll be using these particular phrases in the table below, but it does demonstrate the confusion that could arise.
| poisson salé | salted fish |
| poisson sale | dirty fish |
| tâche quotidienne | daily task |
| tache quotidienne | daily stain |
| blessé et volé | wounded and robbed |
| blesse et vole | wounds and robs |
| maï éclaté non beurré mais caramelisé | caramel-coated, non-buttered popcorn |
| mais eclate non beurre mais caramelise | but explodes not butter but caramelizes |
If you find a need for an obscure diacritic, visit Chart of Diacritical Marks on KD Did It.
Exploring Later . . .
You may also want to explore the Word Confusion posts on “Attach vs Attaché vs Attachée“, “Chargé d’affaires vs Chargée d’affaires“, “Fiancé versus Fiancée“, and/or “Protégé versus Protégée“.
Ensuring Upper- and Lowercase Diacritics are Possible
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head><meta charset=”UTF-8″></head>
The Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (ISO/IEC 10646; UCS) was adopted by the ISO as “the first standardized character set designed to cover all the languages in the world.
It is supported natively by the most recent operating systems (MS Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) It is also used on the Internet with the help of UTF-8 (eight-bit encoded Unicode Transformation Format). HTML 4 supports UTF-8. HTML 5 supports both UTF-8 (the default) and UTF-16!
If you’re using WordPress or Blogspot, they already incorporate it, so you needn’t worry about it.
Creating Symbols
The method of coding can also be used to create symbols, which can come in very handy: ¢ lets you have your 2¢, although with inflation, that’s probably gone up to 2€ (€) or even 293.19 ¥ (¥).
A symbol commonly used by writers is the copyright, or © to create a ©. Fractions can be amazingly handy as well, well at least ½ to ¾ of the time (½ and ¾). If you’re working up some non-fiction, particularly government regulations or legal references, you may find § handy (§).
Formatting Tips started . . .
. . . as my way of dealing with a professional frustration with words that should have been capitalized or italicized, in quotes or not, what should be spelled out and what can be abbreviated, proper styling for the Latin names of plants, the proper formatting and usage of titles and more in manuscripts I was editing as well as books I was reviewing. It evolved into a sharing of information with y’all. I’m hoping you’ll share with us words that have been a bête noire for you from either end.
| Diacritic | ||
| Definition: A mark or sign indicating a difference in pronunciation.
I’m not going to reproduce all the possibilities as there are plenty of websites out there that will provide the code you want; although, not every site that provides a table of codes will have every code, letter, symbol, etc., that you want. |
||
| Some sites that I’ve found useful include HTML Entities, ASCII-Code.com, About.com’s “HTML Codes — HTML Special Characters”, Penn State’s Unicode Entity Codes for Phonetic Diacritics, Alan Wood’s Greek and Coptic, and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Extended Latin. Surprisingly, Wikipedia’s article on Diacritic is quite good, and their entry on Macrons is also useful.
At worst, google for ascii code or character code to find more. Other diacritical marks include double acutes, apostrophes (ď), bars, breves, carons, circumflex + grave (ồ), circumflex + tilde (Ỗ), crescent (ŭ), diaereses, eth (Ð), Greek (ṓ), háček (ǎ), ligatures with an acute accent (ǽ), ligatures with a macron (ǣ), macrons + acute (ḗ), macrons + below underline (Ḵ), macron + grave (ḕ), ogoneks (Ǫ), over (ȧ) and under (ạ) dots, triple under dots (B⃨), overrings (å), ring, slashes + acute (ǿ), vertical slashes (φ), thorns, upside down letters, and more! A.k.a. accent, ascii code, basic glyph, character code, diacritical marks, diacritical point, diacritical sign, glyph |
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| Letter | Mark | Code |
|---|---|---|
| á é ó |
acute | á é ó +++ |
| Ş ş |
cedilla | Ş ş |
| î | circumflex | î |
| À | grave | À |
| ā ē ō |
macron | ā ē ō +++ |
| ø | slash | ø |
| ö | umlaut | ö |
| Æ œ |
A-E or o-e ligature | Æ œ |
| Ǽ ǽ |
Upper- and lowercase a-e ligature with acute | Ǽ ǽ |
| Make Your Own: | ||
| Rule: Each type of diacritic can be “forced” on a letter creating a “homemade” diacritic by typing the letter in front of a base code particular to that diacritic. | ||
| For a . . . | Mark | Base Code (letter + code) |
| b̌ | b with a caron | b̌ |
| V̄ c̄ |
V or c with a macron | V̄ c̄ |
| Some Fun Symbols | ||
| Symbol | Mark | Code |
| ☞ | right pointing index finger in white | ☞ |
| ∴ | therefore | ∴ |
| ß | eszett, or “sharp S” | ß |
| 😉 | winking face | 😉 |
| ° | degree | ° |
| ✓ | check mark | ✓ |
| ← | left-pointing arrow | ← |
| → | right-pointing arrow | → |
| © | copyright | © |
| ℗ | sound recording copyright | ℗ |
| ⏏ | eject | ⏏ |
| Mathematical Symbols | ||
| Symbol | Mark | Code |
| + | plus sign | + |
| − | minus sign | − − |
| × | multiplication | × × |
| ÷ | division sign | ÷; ÷ |
| = | equal sign | = |
| ± | plus or minus sign | ± ± |
| ¾ | three-fourths | ¾ |
| ∏ | N-ary Product | ∏ |
| ⋄ | diamond | ⋄ |
| ##⁄## | Make up your own fractions (although they won’t be as neat as the ¾) | <sup>##</sup>⁄<sup>##</sup> |
| 0̸ | slashed zero | 0̸ |
| ′ | prime (feet, minutes, typographic mark) | ′ |
| ″ | prime (inches, seconds) | ″ |
| ‴ | t-prime | ‴ |
| ⁗ | q-prime | ⁗ |
| √ | square root | √ |
| Money Symbols | ||
| Symbol | Mark | Code |
| ¢ | cent symbol | ¢ |
| $ | dollar or peso sign | $ |
| £ | English pound sign | £ |
| ¥ | yen sign | ¥ |
| € | Euro sign | € |
| 𐆖 | Roman denarius | 𐆖 |
| Roman as, a.k.a. assarius | 𐆚 | |
| ₩ | South Korean won Korean Republic won North Korean won unofficially, the old Korean won |
₩ |
| Musical Symbols | ||
| Symbol | Mark | Code |
| ♭ | flat | ♭ |
| ♮ | natural | ♮ |
| ♩ | quarter note | ♩ |
| ♪ | eighth note | ♪ |
| ♫ | beamed eighth note | ♫ |
| ♬ | beamed sixteenth note | ♬ |
| 𝄞 | G clef | 𝄞 |
| Phonetic Symbols | ||
| Symbol | Mark | Code |
| ə | schwa | ə |
| ɛ | Latin small letter open e | ɛ |
| ŋ | Voiced velar nasal, a.k.a. agma, eng, or engma | ŋ |
| ɻ | Voiced alveolar approximant is a lowercase letter r rotated 180 degrees | ɻ |
| Punctuation Symbols | ||
| Symbol | Mark | Code |
| – | en dash | – |
| — | em dash | — |
| ⸮ | irony punctuation mark | ⸮ |
| " | double quotation mark | " |
| ' | apostrophe single quotation mark |
' |
| ¶ | paragraph a.k.a. pilcrow sign | ¶ |
| ¿ | inverted question mark | ¿ |
| ¡ | inverted exclamation mark | ¡ |
| † ‡ |
dagger double dagger |
† ‡ |
C’mon, get it out of your system, bitch, whine, moan . . . which words are your pet peeves? Also, please note that I try to be as accurate as I can, but mistakes happen or I miss something. Email me if you find errors, so I can fix them . . . and we’ll all benefit!
Satisfy your curiosity about other Formatting Tips by exploring its homepage or more generally explore the index of self-editing posts. You may also want to explore Book Layout & Formatting Ideas, Formatting Tips, Grammar Explanations, Linguistics, Publishing Tips, the Properly Punctuated, Word Confusions, Writing Ideas and Resources, and Working Your Website.
Resources for Diacritics
Crystal, David. Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012. Print. 242–43
“Cultural and Linguistic Characteristics of Québec”. Azim Mandjee et Philippe Brouste. Office québécois de la langue française. 2006. Web. 25 Mar 2016. <http://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/english/infoguides/cultural_ling_char_of_Quebec_IT_20061122.pdf” title=”Opens a new page” target=”_blank”>http://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/english/infoguides/cultural_ling_char_of_Quebec_IT_20061122.pdf>.
“Questions de langue.” Academie-française. 1990. Web. 25 Mar 2016. <http://www.academie-francaise.fr/questions-de-langue#5_strong-em-accentuation-des-majuscules-em-strong>.
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Revised as of 31 Oct 2024
By: Kathy Davie