Two dots (diacritic)
diacritic that consists of two dots placed over a letter
Diacritical marks of two dots ¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in several languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others. For example, in Albanian, ë represents a schwa. Such diacritics are also sometimes used for stylistic reasons (as in the family name Brontë or the band name Mötley Crüe).
In modern computer systems using Unicode, the two-dot diacritics are almost always encoded identically, having the same code point. For example, U+00F6 ö LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS represents both o-umlaut and o-diaeresis. Their appearance in print or on screen may vary between typefaces but rarely within the same typeface.
The word trema (French: tréma), used in linguistics and also classical scholarship, describes the form of both the umlaut diacritic and the diaeresis rather than their function and is used in those contexts to refer to either.
Uses
Diaeresis
As the "diaeresis" diacritic, it is used to mark the separation of two distinct vowels in adjacent syllables when an instance of diaeresis (or hiatus) occurs, so as to distinguish from a digraph or diphthong. For example, in the obsolete spelling coöperate, the diaeresis reminded the reader that the word has four syllables co-op-er-ate, not three.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q116275766. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Two dots (diacritic)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.