Eau is a trigraph which occurs in some languages that use the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

, such as French and English.

French

In Modern French, is pronounced and often appears at the end of a word. Generally, alternates with in another form of a word, for example, the feminine of ''chameau'' ( camel) is ''chamelle''. There are three main ways of spelling : , , and , out of which is by far the rarest. In

Old French Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th -4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ...

, represented a triphthong, probably pronounced (or ). This triphthong originated from the Proto-French diphthong , which had formed from the sequence of and , where L-vocalization#L-vocalization#French, L had vocalized. In the 12th and 13th centuries, both and were used ( was probably a variant pronunciation), but soon became the standard spelling. Eau is also a word in French.

English

In English, only exists in words borrowed from French, and so is pronounced similarly in almost all cases (like in '' plateau'', '' bureau''). Exceptions include ''beauty'' and words derived from it, where it is pronounced , ''bureaucrat'' where it is pronounced , '' bureaucracy'' where it is pronounced , and (in some contexts) the proper names Beaulieu and Beauchamp (as and , respectively).

References

Latin-script trigraphs {{Latin-script-stub