Word.ws English Dictionary

diacritical

diacritical adjective: capable of distinguishing or of making a distinction.

Adjective

diacritical (comparative more diacritical, superlative most diacritical)

  1. Capable of distinguishing or of making a distinction.
  2. Of, pertaining to, or serving as a diacritic.
    • The reduplicated forms and the fineness of the diacritical strokes, render his book troublesome to the reader1869, Alexander John Ellis, On Early English Pronunciation
    • California, like several other states, prohibits the use of diacritical marks or accents on official documents. That means no tilde (~), no accent grave (`), no umlaut (¨) and certainly no cedilla (¸).2015 April 11, Tovin Lapan, “California birth certificates and accents: O’Connor alright, Ramón and José is not”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 04 Apr 2025

Noun

diacritical (plural diacriticals)

  1. Synonym of diacritical mark (adnoun equivalent).
    • This is often the case when diacriticals are written at the end of the word - the last character ends, but there is still some ink in the original writing order that should have been used up in the course of processing the various t's, i's, and apostrophes in the body of the word.1999, Lee Seong-whan, Advances In Handwriting Recognition, page 54

diacritical meaning in Urdu and Malayalam

diacritical in Urdu

امتیازی, تفریقی

diacritical in Malayalam

സ്വരഭേദസൂചകമായ

Synonyms of diacritical

Forms of diacritical

Adjective
comparativemore diacritical
superlativemost diacritical
Noun
pluraldiacriticals

Origin of diacritical

From diacritic + -al.

Words formed from diacritical

Phrases with diacritical

Questions about diacritical

What does diacritical mean?
Diacritical means capable of distinguishing or of making a distinction.
What is diacritical in Urdu?
Diacritical in Urdu is امتیازی, تفریقی. See Diacritical meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is diacritical?
Diacritical can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near diacritical in the dictionary

  1. diacridines
  2. diacrises
  3. diacrisis
  4. diacritic
  5. diacritic-less
  6. diacritical
  7. diacritical hook
  8. diacritical hooks
  9. diacritical mark
  10. diacritical marks
  11. diacritically

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: diacritical (page history and authors); diacritical (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); diacritical (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-diacritical.wav.

Cite this entry: “diacritical.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/diacritical. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.