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I recently saw the word súbitáneamente, with two accent marks.

Now, this is clearly an error, which appears to originate from an OCR transcription of this dictionary, mistaking a comma on the line above for an accent.

Nonetheless, do there exist any words in Spanish with more than one diacritic?

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    Your question says "diacritic" but your title says "accent".
    – chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic-
    Jul 6, 2018 at 17:26
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    @chrylis in the context of 'marks on letters' they're synonyms, no? I mean, I imagine there are some contexts where people might want to use the two contrastively, maybe limiting accents to marks on vowels, using diacritics as marks on any letter etc, but as is I don't see an issue with using both words in the question (especially given that Spanish doesn't use cedillas etc, only marking vowels).
    – jacobo
    Jul 6, 2018 at 17:43
  • In Spanish, an "accent" is a specific mark, and the answers explain the relevance of the distinction.
    – chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic-
    Jul 6, 2018 at 18:06
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    @chrylis that's not really true, accent not being a Spanish word. I think you're identifying accent with tilde/acento gráfico when the word is not necessarily that narrow in scope. My question was purposefully broad to include the dieresis as well as acute accent.
    – jacobo
    Jul 6, 2018 at 18:29

3 Answers 3

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Asides from words with a ü and an accented stress:

  • agüío, aragüirá, changüí, chigüí, chigüín, fragüín, güeldrés, güillín, güirís, güisquería, güérmeces, lengüetería, paragüería, pirgüín, sinvergüencería, yangüés, yegüería, yegüerío, zagüía, lingüístico, etnolingüística, metalingüístico, metalingüísticamente, psicolingüística, sociolingüístico
  • pedigüeñería

and words with multiple ü:

  • güegüecho, güegüenche, güergüero

There are none.

Even loanwords with multiple accents have this reduced to [n]one once they are nativised:

There are some language groups with hyphenated names where each component of the word has an accent, e.g. Paraná-Mamoré, motilón-barí, tupí-guaraní, fulniô-yatê etc. But there are no such words that the RAE recognises, all similar examples only come from components with at most one accent in total e.g. gallego-portugués, camito-semítico etc.

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If you consider the dieresis a diacritic then yes: lingüística.

Otherwise, because the ´ marks the stressed syllable and no words (except for adverbs ending in -mente) have two stressed syllables, it's not possible to have two written ´ marks, unless the word is directly imported and then should be written in italics.

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    Well, in Spain we have Zárágózá (la única palabra del mundo que tiene cuatro acentos para los maños).
    – fedorqui
    Jul 6, 2018 at 10:23
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In case you just mean: " ´ " (not "ñ"!!)

No, there is NOT a Spanish word with more than one accent. The maximum is one accent.

That is because the accent marks the emphasis of a word - in Spanish you ALWAYS just emphasize one syllable per word - so:

  • maximum ONE emphasis per word = maximum one accent per word.
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    The original question shows "súbitamente". But when that word is pronounced the stress falls on the penultimate syllable (not the first). So either the original dictionary is wrong and "subitamente" doesn't have an accent when written, or else the written accent is not always the emphasized syllable.
    – Ed Avis
    Jul 6, 2018 at 12:48
  • @EdAvis - Related: spanish.stackexchange.com/q/19465/9385
    – aparente001
    Jul 6, 2018 at 13:19
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    @EdAvis in súbitamente the stress falls on both the first and next-to-last syllable (and are equally stressed). I explain it a bit in a comment I made in the post aparente001 linked to.
    – user0721090601
    Jul 6, 2018 at 13:25
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    yes.... and no.... words will have only one explicit accent, but there are words with more than one tonic syllable, specially compounded words, as they will normally keep the emphasis of both worlds. specially words ending with mente
    – Mike
    Jul 6, 2018 at 13:35
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    Thanks for link. I guess I was particularly questioning Nico's assertion that "maximum ONE emphasis per word". In súbitamente there are two emphasized syllables. So I think the answer needs tweaking a bit.
    – Ed Avis
    Jul 6, 2018 at 17:03

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