accented

Accented is an adjective describing letters, characters, or texts that bear diacritical marks—also called accents—added to base letters to indicate pronunciation, stress, tone, or orthographic distinctions in many writing systems. Diacritics include a wide range of marks such as acute (á), grave (à), circumflex (â), tilde (ñ, ã), diaeresis or umlaut (ë, ü), cedilla (ç), and caron (č). In some languages, the marks are phonemic, changing the pronunciation or meaning of a word; in others they are historical or conventional.

In Spanish, the acute on the á marks stress and can differentiate words (tú vs tu); in French, é often signals a close /e/ vowel, whereas è or ê indicates different qualities; in Portuguese tilde marks nasalization; in Vietnamese tone marks combine with vowels to indicate phonemic tone; in Turkish diacritics help distinguish otherwise identical letters (i vs ı).

In writing, accented can also describe foreign names or loanwords that retain diacritics (Café, Würzburg) or English text using diacritics for stylistic or linguistic accuracy. Digital text uses Unicode normalization to store precomposed characters (é) or decomposed sequences (e + combining acute). Sorting and case mapping may differ between accented and unaccented forms.

The term accented thus spans orthography, phonology, and digital encoding, reflecting how writing systems encode pronunciation, meaning, or historical development through diacritical marks. In many contexts, unaccented forms are used for simplicity, while accenting preserves linguistic information.