How to spell vis-à-vis out loud

Question

Vis-à-vis is a word on the spelling bee list, but I'm not sure how to say the accented "a" when spelling it out loud. Can you please help?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80 As a general note, you can simply enter any letter or punctuation mark of your liking into a Wikipedia search box and you'll get right to the dedicated article. — RegDwigнt, Jan 09 '15 at 12:59

score 11 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 09 '15 at 02:15

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"À" is called "a-grave", named after the accent it is sporting – a "grave accent".

If you ever come across a different letter with the same accent, it'll be called "letter-grave", e.g. e-grave (È).

Other accented letters will be named similarly. The cedilla (¸) [e.g. in façade], grave (`) , acute (´) [e.g. in résumé], circumflex (ˆ) [e.g. in fête] and diaeresis (¨) [e.g. in naïve] are among the most common accent marks that speakers of English are likely to encounter. (The umlaut is identical in appearance to the diaeresis, but modifies the sound of the vowel it is attached to differently to the diaeresis.)

edited Jan 09 '15 at 02:15

Erik Kowal

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answered Jan 09 '15 at 01:14

Kareen

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A complication in some cases is that when the source language is not one that calls the diacritic by the names most often used in English then we might use the English name or we might use the name from that source language. In this case the source language also calls the character grave (and indeed is the source language of grave itself) so in this case it's "a-grave" either way. – Jon Hanna Jan 09 '15 at 14:29
@Kareen: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223123/ – anongoodnurse Jan 22 '15 at 16:02
@Erik Kowal: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223123/ – anongoodnurse Jan 22 '15 at 16:56

score 7 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 09 '15 at 12:51

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How to spell vis-à-vis out loud:

Vis-à-vis: V ... I ... S ... dash ... a-grave ... dash ... v ... i ... s: vis-à-vis:

Origin

mid 18th century: French, literally 'face to face', from Old French vis 'face'.

In the word "a-grave" the first a is pronounced like the a in Dave, while the second a is pronounced like the a in suave (gräv).

edited Jan 09 '15 at 12:51

ScotM

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answered Jan 09 '15 at 01:09

Good A.M.

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If I wanted to spell out gräv, how would I do that? – Jan 09 '15 at 03:07
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@LegoStormtroopr mit zwei punkte my German teacher would say. – Digital Trauma Jan 09 '15 at 05:48
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@LegoStormtroopr I hope DigitalTraumas german teacher would say mit zwei Punkten instead of Punkte. :P Anyway, since the ä in gräv has nothing to do with the german ä, I'd say you spell it out like a-diaresis or a-trema (but definitely not a-umlaut). – waka Jan 09 '15 at 07:44
@waka Most likely ;-) Its been quite a long time... – Digital Trauma Jan 10 '15 at 03:15
@Good A.M.: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223123/ – anongoodnurse Jan 22 '15 at 16:02
@ScotM: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/223123/ – anongoodnurse Jan 22 '15 at 16:57

How to spell vis-à-vis out loud

2 Answers2