Secondary stress (or secondary accent [obsolete]) is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word; the stronger degree of stress is called 'primary'. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the stressed syllable: the nun in pro nunci ation. Another tradition in English is to assign acute and grave accents for primary and secondary stress: pronùnciátion. Most languages, if they have stress at all, have only one degree of it on the phonemic level. That is, each syllable has stress or it does not.