Secondary stress

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 proˌnunciˈation (the higher vertical line denotes primary stress). Another tradition in English is to assign acute and grave accents for primary and secondary stress: pronùnciátion.