The Ö letter in "Coördinator"

Question

I was watching some Pink Panther episodes on YouTube, and I noticed something weird.

The word COORDINATOR is written COÖRDINATOR with an Ö.

I searched for it in dictionaries and etymology references but found nothing.

Where did it come from? And are there any other similar cases?

Here are some pictures:

"Naïve", "noël" and the given name "Zoë" are the only words I can think of that are still occasionally spelled with a diaeresis in English. All three come from the French where that's part of the correct spelling. My browser's spell checker doesn't accept any of them. This is the first time I've seen "coordinator" spelled with one. — gotube, Oct 01 '21 at 06:57
@gotube "Chloë" is sometimes written with a diaeresis, although "Chloe" is probably more common, and the usual French spelling is "Chloé". — rjpond, Oct 01 '21 at 07:14
"Other similar cases?" (1) Some words have optional accents, e.g. "café", "fiancé", and a smaller number have optional cedillas, e.g. "soupçon", "façade". Dictionaries will usually show both spellings. Personally I strongly believe in retaining these marks, because they are indicators of pronunciation, but not everyone agrees. (2) In English poetry, you occasionally see things like "learnèd" with a grave accent on the "e". This is to make clear that the "e" is pronounced rather than silent. This isn't done in ordinary prose. — rjpond, Oct 01 '21 at 10:41
Is it even part of the letter, or might it be 2 white dots from the background? — Christian, Oct 01 '21 at 11:01
It might have been the case that the person writing that may have been from another country. In Dutch, "coördinator" is actually a word, with the same meaning as the English word coordinator. Often, I see English speaking people write it the English way while writing Dutch, and I see it happen the other way as well, thinking "it's the same word so It'll probably be written the exact same way was well" — user1261104, Oct 01 '21 at 11:08
The New Yorker magazine still uses this diaresis to spell words like coöperate and reëvaluate. It is a slightly irritating quirk that is tolerated by those who regard the magazine with affection. See this article for more. — TonyK, Oct 01 '21 at 11:26
When I first read the question title, I was reminded of Peter Sellers' character Inspector Clouseau's pronounciaton of the word "bomb". — Boluc Papuccuoglu, Oct 01 '21 at 12:36
@Christian definitely part of the letter. It appears the same in both instances here and, whilst old-fashioned, is part of English spelling — Tristan, Oct 01 '21 at 15:14
@rjpond I think the reason these have been mostly phased out is that they require extra effort to type. Most English-speakers probably don't even know how to type them on their computers. Some might know you can copy/paste them from CharMap or equivalent, or they might even know some ALT key codes, but that's extra effort for only a minor improvement in readability. US keyboards don't usually have the AltGr key which is how it's done in most other places, so it's actually a real pain to type accents. So nobody bothers most of the time. — Darrel Hoffman, Oct 01 '21 at 19:02
@Christian It's very clearly not part of the background, as you can see it above in front of two completely different backgrounds. — JLRishe, Oct 03 '21 at 12:13

score 58 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 01 '21 at 06:22

58

See Diaeresis:

The diaeresis indicates that a vowel should be pronounced apart from the letter that precedes it. For example, in the spelling 'coöperate', the diaeresis reminds the reader that the word has four syllables co-op-er-ate, not three, '*coop-er-ate'. In British English this usage has been considered obsolete for many years, and in US English, although it persisted for longer, it is now considered archaic as well

This is now considered an old-fashioned spelling practice in English.

edited Oct 01 '21 at 06:22

rjpond

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answered Sep 30 '21 at 23:49

nschneid

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Note also @Hamdiken that when the offending syllable is a prefix you can separate with a hyphen instead of using the dieresis: "co-ordinator." This is also somewhat archaic. – randomhead Oct 01 '21 at 01:06
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@randomhead Some words are still often written with a hyphen (perhaps especially in the UK). "Co-operate" and "co-ordinate" rarely have a hyphen nowadays, but "co-op" retains its hyphen to distinguish it from "coop". "Re-educate" normally still has a hyphen. – rjpond Oct 01 '21 at 06:21
@nschneid A hyperlink on its own is generally considered poor practice: I've added a quote for you. Feel free to alter or revert if this goes against your intentions. :) – rjpond Oct 01 '21 at 06:23
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Possibly of note, this was inherited from English’s Old French heritage, and is very different from the same symbology found in other Germanic languages, where it either forms a completely different letter (such as in Swedish) or modifies the pronunciation (as is the case of the German umlaut). – Austin Hemmelgarn Oct 01 '21 at 11:43
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If you follow the footnote on that paragraph from Wikipedia also, it goes to a book called Punctuate It Right! (1993, New York) which has an apt quote — "It is much less used than formerly, having been largely replaced by the hyphen or dropped entirely. For example, the dieresis was formerly used almost universally to show that the first two syllbables of cooperate and zoology were pronounced separately: coöperate, zoölogy." We can see from the Pink Panther credits that the episodes are from 1968, so tallies with 'formerly' being used in the book (as it would have been 25 years prior) – anotherdave Oct 01 '21 at 13:07
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The name Brontë is another relatively well-known example. As with the other examples, the diaresis is usually omitted these days. – Caledon Oct 01 '21 at 15:29
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I know it's certainly not frequently used, but I don't know if it's "archaic". ...AFAIK, The New Yorker still uses diaeresis per their Style Guide. See The Curse of the Diaeresis, "The special tool we use here at The New Yorker for punching out the two dots that we then center carefully over the second vowel in such words as “naïve” and “Laocoön” will be getting a workout this year, as the Democrats coöperate to reëlect the President.". – BruceWayne Oct 01 '21 at 17:43
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The New Yorker notwithstanding, most computer spelling corruptors will convert spellings such as coöperate to equivalent spellings without the dieresis such as cooperate. – Jeff Zeitlin Oct 01 '21 at 18:49
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In the case of a final e that might be mistaken for a silent e, I see é used much more frequently than ë. – KRyan Oct 01 '21 at 19:54
See also many names in Tolkein's works - Manwë, Finwë, Fëanor, Eärendil – OrangeDog Oct 02 '21 at 12:12
@OrangeDog: *Tolkien – J W Oct 02 '21 at 13:35
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@BruceWayne However, The New Yorker is well known for its style guide holding on to older practices which are no longer used by other English publications. Or, in other words, it deliberately affects an archaic style due to tradition. (Hence the reference to having a special machine to "punch out the dots.") – trlkly Oct 03 '21 at 07:47
@trlkly oh, I agree. Just wanted to note. – BruceWayne Oct 03 '21 at 13:17
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@AustinHemmelgarn you can't generalize that to all other Germanic languages. In Dutch the diaeresis is still very common for the intent that is described in this answer, and are actually required for spelling words correct. Coordination and cooperation for example is coördinatie and coöperatie in Dutch, and without the dots it's considered incorrect spelling. – Ivo Oct 04 '21 at 06:44
@Caledon: Patrick Brontë at some point started spelling his name that way: it had hitherto been Prunty. – Colin Fine Oct 04 '21 at 10:57

score -8 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 01 '21 at 05:14

-8

The letter o with umlaut (ö) quite frequently appears in German languages. I do not know where the clip comes from, but the below is the explanation from Wikipedia.

Ö in other languages

The letter ö also occurs in two other Germanic languages: Swedish and Icelandic, but it is regarded there as a separate letter, not as an umlauted version of o. Apart from Germanic languages, it occurs in the Uralic languages Finnish, Karelian, Veps, Estonian, Southern Sami, and Hungarian, in the Turkic languages such as Azeri, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur (Latin script), Crimean Tatar, Kazakh, and in the Uto-Aztecan language Hopi, where it represents the vowel sounds [ø, œ]. Its name in Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, Estonian, Azeri, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur, Crimean Tatar, Hungarian, Votic and Volapük is Öö [øː], not "O with two dots" since /ø/ is not a variant of the vowel /o/ but a distinct phoneme.

edited Oct 01 '21 at 05:14

Void

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answered Sep 30 '21 at 23:49

bobby mark

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That's not a very useful answer, to be honest. Its use in other Germanic languages is irrelevant. In fact, although English is genealogically a Germanic language, the use of the diaeresis to separate two vowels (not to create a separate vowel sound as in German or Swedish) is more akin to how the tréma is used in French. – rjpond Oct 01 '21 at 05:32
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The German word umlaut literally means "Change of sound" (so -au "ow" becomes -äu "oy"), whereas diaeresis for the English symbol comes from the Greek διαιρεῖν "to divide, separate" and allows adjacent vowels to be distinguished from each other. – Andrew Leach Oct 01 '21 at 10:38

The Ö letter in "Coördinator"

2 Answers2

Ö in other languages