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The diaeresis (UK /daɪˈɪrᵻsᵻs/, US /daɪˈɛrᵻsᵻs/ dy-ERR-i-sis; plural: diaereses), also spelled diæresis or dieresis and also known as the tréma (also: trema) or the umlaut, is a diacritical mark that consists of two dots ( ¨ ) placed over a letter, usually a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï.
The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics marking two distinct phonological phenomena. The diaeresis represents the phenomenon also known as diaeresis or hiatus in which a vowel letter is not pronounced as part of a digraph or diphthong. The umlaut (/ˈʊmlaʊt/ UUM-lowt), in contrast, indicates a sound shift. These two diacritics originated separately; the diaeresis is considerably older. Nevertheless, in modern computer systems using Unicode, the umlaut and diaeresis diacritics are identical, e.g. U+00E4 ä LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS (HTML ä
· ä
) represents both a-umlaut and a-diaeresis.