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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst".

Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.

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But it's habanero, not habañero - people mistakenly put the ñ by analogy with jalapeño.

I’ve always seen it written with an acute accent: ‘curséd.’ Wikipedia notes both usages, but to my knowledge I have never once read a poem which used a grave accent that way.

The adjective "learnèd" (meaning "well-educated") is a native English word that should take the grave accent even outside of poetry. Also "unlearnèd".

Winged and legged are still pronounced like that too, at least by some.

Interestingly, as an addition to the parent comment, there's a certain point in time where a lot of -ed words are often spelt -'d, which presumably is from the transitionary period between the expectation that the -ed was pronounced and today's general pronunciation.

You see this in Shakespeare's plays, "-ed" endings are the equivalent of "-èd", whereas "-'d" is pronounced "-ed" as is common today.

Oddly enough, I pronounce 'legged' that way, but not 'winged'.

e.g. "Long legged monster"

There’s also the (dying) use of diareses to indicate vowel stress, for example coöperative or naïve.

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