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A diacritic is a little mark you add to a letter — above it, below it, or through it — to show that the sound is not the same as the plain letter. The accent on café, the mark on naïve, the wavy line on Spanish ñ, the two dots on German ü: those are diacritics. English itself almost never needs them on home-grown words; we borrowed the marks with foreign words, and even then many English writers just drop them and write cafe. In other languages the mark is not decoration — it can change the word. Though actually, if you have learned , you already know this idea from tone marks (mā, má, mǎ, mà), which are diacritics too. Teachers also say accent in a loose way; that can mean the mark, or the way a person speaks. Diacritic is the tidy word for the mark.
變音符號
組成A learned borrowing from Ancient Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós): dia- “apart” plus the piece that means “tell apart / judge”. A mark that helps you tell two sounds apart.
同家族的字
- diacriticalthe usual adjective: a diacritical mark is a diacritic
- criticshares the Greek piece for judging / telling things apart
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
diacriticadj/ˌdaɪəˈkɹɪtɪk/
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Distinguishing.
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communicationsjournalismliteratureDenoting a distinguishing mark applied to a letter or character.
diacriticnoun/ˌdaɪəˈkɹɪtɪk/
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A special mark added to a letter to indicate a different pronunciation, stress, tone, or meaning.
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A letter added to another letter serving a similar indicative function.
- A notable feature in N is the frequent oa spellings […] The a is here a diacritic which is meant to distinguish /ɔ̄/ from /ō/ on the model of the distinction ea /ǣ/—e /ē/ in the AB texts.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。