accent

Way of speaking that identifies a person with a particular country, region, language, social class, or some mixture of these.

Accent refers to features of pronunciation; variations from standard grammar and vocabulary are dialects. People often describe only those who belong to groups other than their own as having accents and may give them special names; for example, an Irish brogue, a Southern accent. In England, Standard English is not considered to identify the speaker's place of origin.

accent

Mark (´, ˇ, ˆ) used to indicate stress on a particular syllable or a difference in the pronunciation of a letter. English does not use accents, except in some words of foreign origin such as ‘cliché’, ‘café’, and ‘fête’.

In classical Greek there were three: the acute accent (´), the grave accent (`), and the circumflex (ˆ). There are now a number of other accents. Examples are the háček (ˇ) used in Slavonic languages, and the macron (¯) used to indicate a long vowel in transcriptions of, for example, Sanskrit and Japanese (as in ‘Mahāyāna’, ‘Nō’). Accents can be used to indicate stress, length, or other aspects of pronunciation.

accent

In music, the stress or emphasis on individual notes or passages. Accents may occur naturally in the music. For example, in 4/4 the main accent falls on the first beat, and a secondary accent, less strongly stressed, falls on the third beat. This is known as metrical accent. Adding loudness to a note is known as dynamic accent and is marked by symbols such as > or with letters such as sf (sforzando) or fz (forzando).

accent

In mathematics, symbol used to express feet and inches, for example 2'6" = 2 ft 6 in, and minutes and seconds as subdivisions of an angular degree, for example 60' = 60 minutes, 30" = 30 seconds.