Diaeresis

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /daɪˈɛɹɪsɪs/

Definitions

1. A mark consisting of two dots placed above a vowel to indicate that it is pronounced separately from an adjacent vowel
2. the separation of two adjacent vowels into distinct syllables, marked by a diacritical symbol of two dots placed above the second vowel
3. a typographical device using paired dots above a vowel to signal that it should be pronounced as a separate sound rather than forming a diphthong with a neighboring vowel

Etymology: The most surprising thing about this word is that its Greek ancestor did not originally name a punctuation mark at all. In ancient Greek, "diairesis" meant "division" or "distribution," and it was used in poetry for the point where a word and a metrical foot happened to end together, and for the division of a diphthong into two syllables. The dots came much later, as a way of marking that division on the page. The Greek term was built from "dia-", meaning "across" or "in different directions," joined to "haireo," "to grasp or take," giving a sense of taking something apart into separate pieces. Latin borrowed it in its Late Latin form, and English took it over essentially unchanged, so the word carries its original sense of splitting one thing into two. The Brontë family name shows the device in use: the dots over the e tell readers to say "Bron-tee" rather than treating the vowels as a single sound.