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Related: "Whereäs" as an alternative spelling of "whereas"

Does anyone write "no-one" as "noöne", with the diaeresis (double-dot) serving to separate the syllables?

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Scimonster
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    Short answer: No, no one does that. – Jim Sep 07 '14 at 19:54
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    @Jim If answers don’t have to be correct, then I can make them as short as you would like. – tchrist Sep 07 '14 at 20:00
  • I wouldn’t be surprised if @tchrist does—he loooves him some diaereses! [Dammit, he commented while I got distracted.] – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 07 '14 at 20:05
  • At what point do questions of the same ilk become duplicates? The general answer is the same for each. Should we keep separate questions for each term that might allow for the use of a diaresis? – Drew Sep 07 '14 at 20:30
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    @Drew It depends. Diaereses are becoming more and more rare in English, but some words it's not as infrequent as others. In my opinion, 'naïve' is more common than 'coöperate' is way more common than 'noöne'. – Mitch Sep 07 '14 at 21:36
  • @Mitch. Sure, you are more likely to see diaresis used for some terms than for others. But for questions that ask whether you can use diaresis for X, the answer (assuming X fits the general mold) is yes. This question is of the latter form: Does anyone use a diaresis here? – Drew Sep 07 '14 at 21:55
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    Lacoön used to, but then the snakes came and got him. – bmargulies Sep 08 '14 at 00:22
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    I would imagine the New Yorker does. They love them some diaereses. :) – cHao Sep 08 '14 at 06:34
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    I prefer the short answer, noöne does that. – Jodrell Sep 08 '14 at 10:34
  • @cHao The Guardian also hosts a number of twattlers who appear to value diacritics higher than spelling. The finger of blame could be pointed at Mötley Crüe, Spın̈al Tap, Motörhead or even Blue Öyster Cult but I suspect it is that some people are paranoïd about other people not pronouncing words exactly as they do. – Frank Sep 10 '14 at 18:43

2 Answers2

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Whenever you find a computer spell-checking program does not know how to spell something, your best first assumption is that the program is an idiot. You will usually be right this way.

Including in this case: Wiktionary lists noöne as an “obsolete” spelling of no one.

Did people use it? Yes.

Do people use it? Yes, again!

Morover, a simple Google search would have revealed these answers and many more. One recent published example is from Roger Clarke’s English prose translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, published in 2011 under ISBN 978-1-84749-160-2:

No there is noöne else in the world I could have surrendered my heart to. It is decreed by the highest authority, it is the call of Heaven: I am yours, Eugene.

Edit

After pawing through general Google results, I really do get the feeling that the archaic noöne spelling is experiencing some strange kind of orthographic renaissance, but for what reason, I have no idea. Most of the general online results are 21st century ones. I can’t find many from the late 20th century.

I see three groupings of letters used with diacritics in English:

  1. It may simply be that people are becoming more familiar with how to use keyboard shortcuts for diacriticking words in English like Zoë, Chloë, Noël, café, coöperate, reëlect, learnèd, zoölogy, oöcyte, which are all perceived to be “native-English” words, whatever their origin.
  2. Those are different from “unassimilated” imports like Ångström, Renée, José, naïve, façade, résumé, jalapeño, El Niño, Curaçao, São Paulo, Shijō, Ceaușescu, etc.
  3. The restoration of diacritics to words long spelt without them in English, words like noöne, mosaïc, hôtel, rôle, châteaux, and so on, might be something else, some sord of fad perhaps. It almost seems like it might be such on Stack Exchange Chat, where noöne is strangely common.

However, I don’t see us ever going back to adding actual Ænglisc letters like æsc, eth, thorn, yogh, or wynn back into current orthography. I have seen nothing at all like this happening the way we may be seeing occur with diacritics, where people freed of the tyranny of the typewriter can once again write whatever they please.

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    Wow, Google's fast. It's already picked up on this question. :) – Scimonster Sep 07 '14 at 20:10
  • @Scimonster Yes, they index us within a few minutes. Note that I have a published reference for you now, too. – tchrist Sep 07 '14 at 20:27
  • And then there are cases like preëmpt, which exist though they shouldn't… (Also, when you say Noël, are you talking about people called Noel trematising their name? Or about the fête?) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 07 '14 at 22:25
  • Pre-empt is a funny one in that outside of caveat emptor, English has no notion of empt as anything, let alone an early buy or some such, so there is no word to confuse it with or to separate it from. But it is still pronounced in hiatus. Apparently preëmpt the verb recently backformed from pre-emption from putative *præemptiōnem < præemĕre* forms in the Middle Ages. But the OED has a citation for prëemptioners even. As for Noël, yes, it’s the person-name, like Noël Coward. There even appear to be girl-Noëlles, which is half-strange. – tchrist Sep 07 '14 at 23:29
  • A lot of those google hits are people's usernames, or articles/discussions/references about this unusual spelling. It's very very very very rare to just crop up in natural writing. – user56reinstatemonica8 Sep 08 '14 at 12:33
  • Also, does anyone really perceive oocyte as more English than naïve or résumé? The only difference I can perceive is that the diacritics are more commonly retained in group 2 (except names, of course)… – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 05 '14 at 04:31
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Oh probably. But I may not be the right person to ask: once when I casually mentioned that “We don’t bother writing zoölogy any longer because everyone knows it has four syllabes, and no zoos were harmed in the making of this word” I got a zillion counterexamples of native speakers actually uttering things like zoological with the same starting syllable as in zoo. I was crestfallen. – tchrist Dec 05 '14 at 04:40
  • Well, zoological and its ilk do have the same starting syllable as zoo, just with a separate syllable represented by the second o. That's what my comment about preëmpt above was about, by the way: the diaeresis there is quite unnecessary, because /pri:mpt/ is simply phonotactically impossible in English. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 05 '14 at 04:44
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Really? I have /ˌzoʊ.əˈlɒdʒɪkəl/ not /ˌzu.əˈlɒdʒɪkəl/ myself, but your mileage may vary. Perhaps phonemic /oʊ/ reduced to [ʉ] or [ɵ] due to lack of primary stress? – tchrist Dec 05 '14 at 04:54
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    @JanusBahsJacquet I remember now where this came up before. It was whether zoologist had a vowel in its first syllable like the one in Joe (or in Zoë) or whether it was like the one in zoo. To my jaded and archaizing ear, it sounds like a *zoo-ologist* should be a student of zoos not of animals. :) – tchrist Dec 05 '14 at 18:37
  • Interesting! I can't say I've ever consciously noticed anyone say ‘Zoe-ologist’ (as it were). I wonder if I'd baulk at it or not… – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 05 '14 at 18:40
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The fiercest defender of diereses I know of in the professional world is The New Yorker magazine, which still spells it "coöperate," and even they don't spell it "noöne."

Lore Sjöberg
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