''umlaut'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260817185222-00-⌔

umlaut - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

umlaut (plural umlauts or umlaute)

• (linguistics) An assimilatory process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vocoid that is separated by one or more consonants.
  • ✤ In fits of concealed despair that went unnoticed even by those close enough to touch, Julien cursed the language of umlauts, eszetts, and gerunds.¹
  • ✤ A tittle is more or less the same thing (the dot over an i, for instance), except that it can be traced back to Medieval Latin for a little mark over or under a letter, such as an accent ague or a cedilla. I don’t know whether an umlaut is one or two tittles. Maybe it’s a jot and a tittle side by side.²
• (linguistics) The umlaut process (as above) that occurred historically in Germanic languages whereby back vowels became front vowels when followed by syllable containing a front vocoid (e.g. Germanic lūsiz > Old English lȳs(i) > Modern English lice).
• (linguistics) A vowel so assimilated.
• (orthography) The diacritical mark (¨) placed over a vowel when it indicates a (rounded) front vowel
• (informal, orthography) Synonym of diaeresis.
  • ✤ “Naïve” takes an umlaut because it is pronounced as two syllables.
  • ✤ 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 (¸).³

Verb

umlaut (third-person singular simple present umlauts, present participle umlauting, simple past and past participle umlauted)

• (transitive) To place an umlaut over (a vowel).
  • ✤ We kept some of the foreign alphabet symbols such as the accented and umlauted vowels and Greek letters and used the rest of the space for more esoteric linguistic symbols such as “barred-l,” and “engma.”⁴
• (linguistics, transitive) To modify (a word) so that an umlaut is required in it.
  • ✤ an umlauting vowel
  • ✤ These, together with (some) Romansh lects, belong to our West Rhaetian; the/ȫ/also supported by two lects from the Ticino which by our criteria are NWIt, and by the partially umlauting lects of Lombardy which together with (some) Engadine lects belong to our East Rhaetian.⁵

Etymology

🖼️ ➺

The logo of Matthäi, a large construction company in northern Germany. The second a has an umlaut (noun sense 4) over it.

🖼️ ➺

Two umlaut diacritics (noun sense 4) over the a s in two words.

🖼️ ➺

Development of the umlaut (noun sense 4) in German handwriting.

Borrowed from German Umlaut in the 19${}^{th}$ century, from um- or um (“around, re-, trans-”) + Laut (“sound”), from Old High German hlūt. More at loud.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈʊm.laʊt/, /ˈʌmlaʊt/
• (General American) IPA: /ˈʊm.laʊt/, /ˈumlaʊt/
• Audio (General American): 🔊
• Rhymes: -aʊt
• Hyphenation: um‧laut

Printed 2026-08-17.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 1997, Matthew Piepenburg, Time and the Maiden, →ISBN, page 62: ↩

2. 2008, Roy Blount, Alphabet juice: the energies, gists, and spirits of letters: ↩

3. 2015 April 11, Tovin Lapan, “California birth certificates and accents: O’Connor alright, Ramón and José is not”, in The Guardian ‎${}^{[1]}$, archived from the original on 4 April 2025: ↩

4. 1989, Elizabeth A. Edwards, “A Computer Column for All Seasons”, in Margaret S. Boone, editor, Practicing Anthropology, volume 11, number 2: ↩

5. 1980, Frederick B. Agard, The Genealogy of the French Language, published in Contributions to historical linguistics, →ISBN, page 222: ↩