acumen: [16] Acumen is a direct borrowing from Latin acūmen, which meant both literally ‘point’ and figuratively ‘sharpness’. It derived from the verb acuere ‘sharpen’, which was also the source of English acute. The original pronunciation of acumen in English was /ə_kjūmen/, with the stress on the second syllable, very much on the pattern of the Latin original; it is only relatively recently that a pronunciation with the stress on the first syllable has become general. => acute
