Other forms: accents
An accent is the particular way people from one place or group pronounce their words. A strong accent, a French accent, lose your accent.
Accent is about pronunciation only; dialect covers vocabulary and grammar as well. Everybody has one — the idea of speaking without an accent means nothing more than sounding like the listener. Attitudes to accents carry real prejudice, which is worth naming. An accent is also the written mark over a letter, as in café, and in music the emphasis on a note. Note accent as a verb meaning to emphasise.
1nounaccentThe way people from one place pronounce their words.
“You can place her accent to within about ten miles.”
2nounmarkA written mark over a letter.
“The accent changes the whole word in Spanish.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
accent is a feature of speech or writing.
Latin accentus is ad-, to, plus cantus, song — a translation of a Greek term for the pitch pattern of speech. The Romans understood accent as the singing in a voice, which is a better description of it than the modern word suggests.
Middle English
accent
English, today
accent
Built from
From Middle English accent. Middle English accent, from Medieval Latin accentus and Old French accent, acent, both from Latin accentus, past participle of accinō (“sing to, sing along”), from ad- + canō (“to sing”). The word accent had been borrowed into Old English already, but was lost and reborrowed in Middle English. Displaced native Old English swēġ.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA