Diaeresis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the phonological term. For the diacritic ¨, see Diaeresis (diacritic).
In linguistics, a diaeresis, or dieresis (AE) (from Greek διαίρεσις, διαιρεῖν diairein, to divide) is the division of two adjacent vowels as two syllables rather than as a diphthong. An example is "coöperate". The opposite phenomenon is known as synaeresis.
[edit] Orthography
In orthography, the term "diaeresis" is sometimes used as a shortening of "diaeresis mark", which designates a diacritic similar to the umlaut sign (¨) that was originally placed over vowels to indicate that they had undergone a phonological diaeresis, but has since been repurposed for a variety of different functions, in various languages. See Diaeresis (diacritic).
