Remember, girl, here, I'm Minyeon Fuggerty, your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today we'll talk about why you sometimes see dots over letters in English, like in the

New Yorker, and we'll talk about the plural of the word money.

A listener named Al recently wrote in about our segment on the word re-enter.

Sometimes it's written with a hyphen and sometimes without.

But he suggested a third option, using the diaresis, which as an aside, I'd never heard

said out loud before and would have pronounced diaresis if I hadn't looked it up, but it's

diaresis, three tears for dictionaries.

So the diaresis is a diacritical mark that looks like two little dots above a letter.

It sometimes appears in English over the second of two consecutive vowels.

If you're familiar with German, you may have mistaken it for an umlaut, since they look

the same.

But the diaresis's job in English is to show that the second vowel is treated as a

second syllable.

Think of the long E in Chloe, for example.

The second O in cooperate, or the I in naive.

You're probably thinking to yourself, I've seen these words before and they didn't have

any little dots in them.

Well, that's because the diaresis, along with most diacritical marks, have fallen out

of use in English.

Take the word hotel.

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