unaccented

Unaccented is an adjective that describes something lacking an accent, diacritic marks, or stress in speech. In linguistics and phonology, an unaccented syllable is one that receives little or no prominence in a word's rhythm. In English, many unstressed syllables reduce vowels, often to a schwa. The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables contributes to meter, such as iambic pentameter, where unaccented syllables alternate with stressed ones. In languages with tonal or vowel quality distinctions, unaccented vowels may be pronounced with less emphasis; prosodic features may vary by dialect.

In orthography and typography, unaccented letters are the base characters without diacritics. Diacritics mark features such as tone, height, or nasalization; removing them yields unaccented forms used in basic ASCII text, search, and data normalization. The process of converting accented letters to their unaccented equivalents is called diacritic stripping or ASCII-folding; examples: é -> e, ñ -> n, ü -> u. Such normalization affects sorting, indexing, and transliteration.

In computing and linguistic databases, unaccented forms help unify variants and improve search; however, removing diacritics can change meaning for languages where diacritics distinguish words. In music, unaccented notes are those not marked with an accent or strong emphasis, often belonging to weak or offbeat positions in a measure.