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, respectively: pronùnciátion.