This week’s theme
Misleading words

This week’s words
pronation
militate
instar
diaeresis
funambulism

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PRONUNCIATION:

(dy-ER-uh-sis)

MEANING:

noun:
1. The separation of two adjacent vowel sounds.
2. The mark ¨ placed over a vowel to indicate that it’s pronounced as a separate syllable, for example, in naïve or Brontë.
3. A break in a line of verse when the end of a word coincides with the end of the metric foot.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin diaeresis, from Greek diairesis (division), from diairein (to divide), from dia- (apart) + hairein (take). Earliest documented use: 1656.

NOTES:

Q. Why did the vowel wear a diaeresis to the NYC party?
A. It didn’t want to blend in!
Especially when the party was thrown by The New Yorker. The diaeresis is a favorite of the magazine. Read more about it: The Curse of the Diaeresis. The umlaut looks the same as the diaeresis but functions differently. The umlaut changes the pronunciation of the underlying vowel as opposed to indicating separate pronunciation.

USAGE:

“However, it was not until much later in life that Patrick went a step further and adopted the diaeresis which was to make the name Brontë.”
James Tully; The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë; Constable & Robinson; 1999.

See more usage examples of diaeresis in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: