§ 256. The role of word accenfuation in OE word-building was not great. Like sound interchanges, the shifting of word stress helped to differentiate between some parts of speech being used together with other means. The verb had unaccented prefixes while the corresponding nouns had stressed prefixes, so that the position of stress served as an additional distinctive feature between them, e.g. ond-'swarian v — 'ond-swaru n (see more examples in § 115, dealing with word stress). In some nouns, however, the prefix was as unaccented as in the verbs.