What ˘ means
It marks shortness or helps form a letter. Romanian ă, Turkish ğ, and Esperanto ŭ are distinct letters with language-specific jobs for the mark.
Breve marks guided readings of Greek poetry whose rhythm depends on syllable length. Copies of the poet Bacchylides' poems on papyrus (an ancient plant-based writing material), mostly from the 2nd century CE, preserve selective breves reflecting scholarship reaching back to the 2nd century BCE. A later attribution to Greek playwright Aristophanes rests on 16th-century manuscripts with doubtful histories; the curved line's grammatical use is recorded from the 1540s.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
4
Related characters
3
Combination ideas
4Questions people ask
1Why does ˘ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
16
Collections with ˘
5
How to type or find ˘
- Search it as
- breve mark · vowel length · macron · combining form · ă · ğ · ŭ
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.