Secondary stress (or obsolete:
secondary accent) is the weaker of two degrees of
stress in the
pronunciation of a word; the stronger degree of stress being called
primary. The
International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the secondarily stressed syllable: as before the
nun in (the higher vertical line denotes primary stress). Another tradition in English is to assign
acute and
grave accents for primary and secondary stress:
pronùnciátion.