accents

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of accent.

   The language students worked to soften their foreign accents.

   French and Spanish both use accents over certain letters to guide pronunciation.

   Note

   One spelling covers two quite different things here: the ways people pronounce a language, as in regional or foreign accents, and the marks written over letters, as in French accents. Context usually sorts them out. Saying someone simply "has an accent" to mean a foreign one is informal and sometimes frowned upon, since native speakers have accents too. The same spelling also serves the verb meaning "emphasizes".

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of accent.

   The designer accents the plain hallway with a single framed print.

   In this dialect, the speaker accents the final syllable of the word.

   Note

   The verb always takes an object: someone accents a syllable, a room, or a word on the page. In talk about design and style it means to set something off, as when a single print accents a hallway, and there it comes close to accentuate. Its other uses belong to speech, where a speaker stresses a syllable, and to writing, where a writer adds accent marks to letters.

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