According to recent proposals Danish stød is the phonetic manifestation of a HL tonal pattern compressed within one syllable, making the stød/non-stød distinction a special case of the more general tonal word accent distinction in Swedish and Norwegian. This review of the relevant aspects of Danish stød and intonation demonstrates that (1) such a tonal representation of stød is contradicted by the phonetic reality. (2) Stød is distributed in words according to roughly the same principles across regional varieties of Danish, but tonal patterns are highly variable. (3) Word accents in Swedish and Norwegian are associated exclusively with stressed syllables, whereas stød occurs also in less than fully stressed syllables, devoid of autonomous pitch movements. (4) A word in Swedish and Norwegian can have one pitch accent only, but Danish words may have more than one stød.