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ö
Letter o with diaeresis

English rarely uses diacritics, which are symbols indicating the modification of a letter's sound when spoken. Most of the affected words are in terms imported from other languages. Certain diacritics are often called accents. The only diacritic native to Modern English is the two dots (representing a vowel hiatus): its usage has tended to fall off except in certain publications and particular cases. However, these and other accents, diacritics, and non-standard letters do appear in English-language text.

Proper nouns are not generally counted as English terms except when accepted into the language as an eponym – such as Geiger–Müller tube.

Unlike continental European languages, English orthography tends to use digraphs (like "sh", "oo", and "ea") rather than diacritics to indicate more sounds than can be accommodated by the letters of the Latin alphabet. Unlike other systems (such as Spanish orthography) where the spelling indicates the pronunciation, English spelling is highly varied, and diacritics alone would be insufficient to make it reliably phonetic. (See English orthography § History.)

Commonly encountered diacritical marks used in English

Most words with diacritics used in English are loanwords. Sometimes more precisely called borrowed words, these have entered the English language from foreign languages by a process of naturalisation, or specifically anglicisation, which is carried out mostly unconsciously (a similar process occurs in all other languages). During this process, there is a tendency to adapt the original word: this includes accents and other diacritics being dropped (for example French hôtel and French rôle becoming "hotel" and "role" respectively in English, or French à propos, which lost both the accent and space to become English "apropos"). Some imported words can be found in print in both their accented and unaccented versions (e.g., café or cafe).

Other uses of diacritics in English include the two dots and, in poetry marking, the grave accent, to indicate pronunciation. Such usage is stylistic and does not indicate that the word is imported from another language.

Two dots

Two dots above a vowel serves various uses in English.

In some cases, the diacritic is not borrowed from any foreign language but is purely of English origin. The second of two vowels in a hiatus can be marked with two dots, called a diaeresis or "tréma" in this usage, as in words such as coöperative, daïs and reëlect. This use has become less common, sometimes being replaced by the use of a hyphen (e.g., re-elect). The New Yorker and MIT Technology Review under Jason Pontin have maintained such usage as house styles. Some loanwords, like naïve, can be found with diaeresis in English-language sources that do not otherwise use style for words like cooperate. Other examples include names such as Zoë and Noël.

The diaeresis mark is also in rare cases used over a single vowel to show that it is pronounced separately (as in the Brontë family).

In German and other languages, the two dots are called an umlaut and indicate that the vowel makes a different sound from the unmarked vowel. In words of German origin (e.g. doppelgänger, über), the letters with umlaut ⟨ä⟩ ⟨ö⟩ and ⟨ü⟩ may be written in English as ⟨ae⟩ ⟨oe⟩ and ⟨ue⟩, respectively. This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for Führer. However, today umlauts are usually either left out, with no ⟨e⟩ following the previous letter (Fuhrer), or included as written in German (as in The New York Times or The Economist). Zurich is an exception since it is not a case of a "dropped umlaut", but is a genuine English exonym, used also in French (from Latin Turicum)—therefore it may be seen written without the umlaut even alongside other German and Swiss names that retain the umlaut.

Umlauts are sometime used for stylistic effect. Examples include the metal umlaut used by English-speaking bands such as Mötley Crüe.

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The acute and grave accents are occasionally used in poetry and lyrics: the acute to indicate stress overtly where it might be ambiguous (rébel vs. rebél) or nonstandard for metrical reasons (caléndar); the grave to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced (warnèd, parlìament).

In historical versions of English

The Old English Latin alphabet began to replace the Runic alphabet in the 8th century, due to the influence of Celtic Christian missionaries to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Orthography of Old English – which was entirely handwritten in its own time – was not well standardized, though it did not use all the Latin letters, and included several letters not present in the modern alphabet. When reprinted in modern times, an overdot is occasionally used with two Latin letters to differentiate sounds for the reader:

• ċ is used for a voiceless palato-alveolar affricate /t͡ʃ/
• ġ for a palatal approximant /j/ (probably a voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/ in the earliest texts)

Some modern printings also apply diacritics to vowels following the rules of Old Norse normalized spelling developed in the 19th century.

In the Late Middle English period, the shape of the English letter þ (thorn), which was derived from the Runic alphabet, evolved in some handwritten and blackletter texts to resemble the Latin letter y. The þ shape survived into the era of printing presses only as far as the press of William Caxton. In later publications, thorn was represented by "y", or by ẏ to distinguish thorn from y. By the end of the Early Modern English period, thorn had been completely replaced in contemporary usage by the digraph "th" (reviving a practice from early Old English), and the overdot was no longer needed outside of printings of very old texts. The overdot is missing from the only surviving usage of a Y-shaped thorn, in the archaic stock phrase ye olde (from "þe olde", pronounced "the old", but "ye olde" is often misread and pronounced with the modern "y" sound).

Words imported from other languages

Words that retain their accents often do so to help indicate pronunciation (e.g. frappé, naïve, soufflé), or to help distinguish them from an unaccented English word (e.g. exposé vs. expose, résumé vs. resume, rosé vs. rose). Technical terms or those associated with specific fields (especially cooking or musical terms) are less likely to lose their accents (such as the French crème brûlée, étude, façade).

Some Spanish words with the Spanish letter ñ have been naturalised by substituting English ny (e.g., Spanish cañón is now usually English canyon, Spanish piñón is now usually English pinyon pine). Certain words, like piñata, jalapeño and quinceañera, are usually kept intact. In many instances the ñ is replaced with the plain letter n.

The German letter ß is usually replaced in English by ‘ss’. This is seen in names such as Pascal Groß.

Accent-addition and accent-removal

As words are naturalized into English, sometimes diacritics are added to imported words that originally did not have any, often to distinguish them from common English words or to otherwise assist in proper pronunciation. In the cases of maté from Spanish mate (/ˈmɑːteɪ/; Spanish: ['mate]), animé from Japanese anime, and latté or even lattè from Italian latte (/ˈlɑːteɪ/; Italian pronunciation: [ˈlatte] ^ⓘ), an accent on the final e indicates that the word is pronounced with /eɪ/ ^ⓘ at the end, rather than the e being silent. Examples of a partial removal include resumé (from the French résumé) and haček (from the Czech háček) because of the change in pronunciation of the initial vowels. Complete naturalization stripping all diacritics also has occurred, in words such as canyon, from the Spanish cañón. For accurate readings, some speech writers use diacritics to differentiate homographs, such as lēad (pronounced like liːd) and lĕad (pronounced like lɛd).

In reverent and slightly poetic usage are commonly two -ed suffixed adjectives, if prefixed by a superlative, “learnèd” whereas rarely so “belovèd”. These are pronounced with two and three syllables respectively, unlike their related past participle versions. In courts, “my learnèd friend” is for any other specific representative at the bar, “the learnèd judge” for any cited judge and “this/the learnèd professor” or any other contributor’s title for anyone else cited who is legally highly qualified. Many wedding ceremonies begin “Dearly belovèd”, whether correctly spelt this way or not. This list expands to almost all -ed words in hymns and old rhymes if by chance helping with rhythm, emphasis or musical cadence. The, to some clerics, mildly blasphemous, quiet, polite curse “the blessèd (object)” still features in most British dialects, it being more reserved to main liturgy as the blessèd Virgin Mary, our blessèd saviour and blessèd are the poor, they who mourn and others upon whom the New Testament confirms unconditional blessing.