A Word about Accents

English doesn’t use accents, officially, though we do have the diaresis (dee-AIR-a-sis) , which has fallen into disuse. Technically, you use the diaresis when you have a pair of vowels that could be interpreted as a digraph (both vowels making one sound such as the “oa” in “boat), but they need to be pronounced separately. “Coöperate” is the old way of spelling co-operate. Another one is “naïve,” which, I think, you see somewhat more often.

Then we have loan words, words borrowed from another language, and they bring their accents with them. The example of this that comes to mind immediately is the word for a document summarizing your work history, intended you get you an interview. It’s résumé. You really need to use those accents, because English has a perfectly good word spelled without the accents. Fortunately the two words don’t generally appear in the same context. (ahem) The comic below could be an example of both words together; his résumé resumes below the repair.

So how do you make accents?

• You can find one someplace and do a copy and paste.
• You can look up the ASCII code (google it). To use the ASCII code, hold down the Alt key while you type the (Latin-1) numbers on the numeric keypad. I don’t have a Mac, but apparently you hold down Option-Shift while you enter the (Roman) number.
• There’s a browser extension named Accent Grid for Chrome in the Chrome Web Store that shows a 4×4 grid of accented characters that you copy and paste into your document. You can change the choice of characters that appear by going to Settings and entering the html code for the character.
• Many applications have their own keystroke combinations for some of these, too.
• Memorize a few that you use a lot. The lowercase e with an acute accent, for example, is Alt-0233. In Word you can also do Ctrl-Alt-e.