diacriticsfree

Diacriticsfree is a term used to describe text that is written without diacritical marks—such as accents, tildes, umlauts, cedillas, and other diacritic modifiers. It denotes a representation using only unmodified base letters.

In practical terms, diacriticsfree text is often produced to maximize compatibility with systems that support only a basic Latin alphabet, such as certain databases, URLs, or legacy software. It can also aid search and indexing when diacritics are inconsistently entered or stored.

Technically, Unicode supports both precomposed characters and combining diacritical marks. A diacriticsfree form typically involves stripping combining marks and, in some cases, replacing letters with diacritics with their closest ASCII base letter. This process is related to diacritic stripping or ASCII folding.

Usage can affect readability and pronunciation. Diacritics convey phonetic information in many languages, and removing them can reduce clarity or cause mispronunciation. Some contexts deliberately avoid diacritics for neutrality or simplicity, while others discourage their removal to preserve linguistic accuracy.

Examples include transforming café to cafe, naïve to naive, and jalapeño to jalapeno. The term is often discussed in discussions of internationalization, web design, and text normalization.

See also: ASCII, Unicode, diacritic, transliteration, normalization form.