accent mark
noun
Simple meaning
A diacritical mark used to indicate stress or placed above a vowel to indicate a special pronunciation.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
uhksehntmahrkSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
əkˈsɛntˈmɑɹk
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
linguisticsstrictly
A diacritical mark used to indicate stress or placed above a vowel to indicate a special pronunciation
music
A mark used to represent specific stress on a note.
linguisticsstrictly
A diacritical mark or character used in writing to indicate the place of stress (spoken accent), or to indicate the nature or quality of the vowel marked (such as long vowel versus short vowel).
linguisticsloosely
Any diacritical mark.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A diacritical mark used to indicate stress or placed above a vowel to indicate a special pronunciation
Used this way, accent mark is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a grammar or language-study use: it describes how language works, so it appears in teaching and reference writing.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Academic writing
- Education/classroom
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.