Knowra Diacritic Diacritic A mark added to a letter or symbol to distinguish its pronunciation, meaning, or grammatical function. Diacritics may appear above, below, through, or beside the character they modify.
Grapheme : A minimal unit of a writing system that can distinguish meaning or represent language. A diacritic modifies a grapheme or combines with it to form a distinct written character.
Combining character : A Unicode character that modifies the preceding character when rendered with it. Many diacritics are encoded as combining characters rather than as part of a single letter.
Acute accent : A diacritic shaped like a short stroke rising from left to right, usually placed above a letter. It marks stress, vowel quality, tone, or other distinctions in languages such as Spanish and Hungarian.
Punctuation : A system of marks that organizes written language and clarifies sentence structure or meaning. Punctuation separates or structures text rather than modifying an individual letter's identity or pronunciation.
Orthography : The conventional system for writing a language, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Orthographic rules determine which diacritics a language writes and when they are required.
Precomposed character : A character encoded as one code point despite being representable as a base character plus combining marks. Its encoding contrasts with the separate base-letter-and-diacritic sequence.
Tilde : A wavy diacritic placed above a letter, also used as a standalone symbol in mathematics and computing. In Spanish, it distinguishes ñ; in Portuguese, it marks nasal vowels.
Ligature : A typographic form that joins two or more letters into one glyph. A ligature combines letter shapes; a diacritic adds a mark to a character.
Phoneme : A speech sound category that distinguishes words in a particular language. In many alphabets, a diacritic signals a pronunciation difference that distinguishes phonemes.
Unicode normalization : A process that converts text into standardized Unicode representations for comparison or storage. Normalization can make visually identical diacritic spellings compare consistently.
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