Diacriticated

Diacriticated is a rarely used term that describes text containing diacritics—marks added to letters to modify their pronunciation or meaning. The more standard terms are diacritic, diacritized, or diacriticized; “diacriticated” is not widely accepted in formal usage.

Diacritics encompass a range of marks, including the acute (é), grave (è), and circumflex (â); the tilde (ñ); diaeresis or umlaut (ï, ö); the cedilla (ç); the macron (ā); the caron or hacek (č); the ring above (å); the dot above (ż); the breve (ă); and the ogonek (ą). They may appear above, below, or through a letter and serve to signal pronunciation, tone, stress, nasalization, vowel quality, or grammatical distinctions.

Most diacritics are used in languages that employ Latin scripts. For example, French and Spanish rely on various accents to distinguish words, Turkish uses a dotless i and other marks for phonemic contrast, and Vietnamese encodes tone and vowel quality through multiple diacritics on vowels. In other scripts, diacritical marks also play roles in indicating pronunciation or transliteration.

In computing, diacritics can be represented as precomposed characters or as combining diacritical marks. Unicode supports both approaches, and text may be normalized to NFC (composed) or NFD (decomposed) form to aid search, comparison, and rendering. Practical issues include keyboard input, font support, and the handling of diacritics in URLs or software identifiers, which often favor ASCII or transliteration for compatibility.

See also: diacritic, diacritization, Unicode normalization.