Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and I’m here to introduce the diaeresis. This mark is so obscure that Word, where I’m typing this transcript, doesn’t recognize the spelling. Surprisingly, though, you’ve probably seen it before. It’s those two dots over an “e” or another vowel.

Some of you are protesting: isn’t that called an umlaut? Nope. The diaeresis, a type of diacritical mark, serves a different purpose. Umlauts change the sound of a letter. Diaereses remind the reader that two consecutive vowels are meant to be pronounced separately. The word that always comes to mind as an example is preexisting. Pre-existing. Those two e’s are pronounced separately, so the second one might have a diaeresis. Naïve, Noel, and Chloe are other examples.

This mark is interesting and makes you look fancy, but pretty much everyone thinks it’s archaic in English—except, interestingly, the New Yorker.

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