http://wordsmith.org/awad/archives/0399

ailurophile
pyromania
acarophobia - “You might as well sit on the seat, the crabs in here jump fifteen feet.”
geomancy
misogamy
agrostology
kleptocracy
piacular
picante
pizzicato
piddle = poodles piddle puddles
pianissimo
pissoir
pilose
algolagnia
misoneism
phillumenist
megalopolis
georgic
pyrophoric
cosmopolis
interrobang
apostrophe
circumflex
tilde
virgule
ampersand
diaeresis
phonetic
abbreviation
monosyllabic

diaeresis

We had pretty much decided that this word is the proper name for what we might call the lazy colon, the two dots over a letter, whether its function is to indicate the change of a vowel sound due to influence by a following vowel, the process known as umlaut (cf. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut), or to indicate that the vowel so marked is pronounced independently of the preceding vowel, as in naïve. But this site (http://www.csi.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/ling-devices.html) claims that diaeresis is the name of the latter process.

A) Whoda thunk?

and

2) Now what do we call the lazy colon?

Constipated?

>Now what do we call the lazy colon?

d'oh.. umlaut? (or is this a trick question..)
-ron umluaf

Dear Faldage. Sorry about retarded peristalsis quip.
I think it an error to say the umlaut is a form of dieresis.
In German script, that is handwriting, a small "e" is two vertical marks. As far as I know, it was just a sort of time saving convenience to put a miniature "e" over a vowel, instead of using two normal sized vowels.
I never thought to ask the prof why Goethe didn't use an umlaut in his name. Now that I think of ir neither did Hitler's propagandist Goebbels. But his Luftwaffe guy, Gõring, did.

In reply to:

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a cat fancier : a lover of cats

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...looks pretty damn close to ayleur. Maybe an ayleurophile could be a lover of cats and a lover of AWAD. Don't worry about Jackie. She never looks down here.