What ̆ means
Type the base letter first, then insert the breve. In a Unicode-aware editor, the mark attaches above the letter and takes no separate space. For Unicode hex input, insert 0306 after the base letter using your editor's Unicode-entry command; shortcuts differ.
What does a breve mean?
It usually marks a short vowel, but the language decides. In pronunciation guides, it signals shortness, opposite a macron's long-vowel cue. In spelling, it appears in letters such as ă in Romanian and Vietnamese, ğ in Turkish and Azerbaijani, and ŭ in Esperanto. The curve itself has no universal sound.
The word breve appears as a music term in the 15th century; its short-vowel mark sense is recorded in the 1540s.
Why is my breve in the wrong place?
Substitute fonts can shift the mark away from its letter. A Firefox 46 report documented Verdana shifting the mark sideways when the browser used substitute fonts for the base and mark. A font that includes both glyphs and positions accents correctly can fix this.
A second accent must be positioned relative to both its letter and the first mark, so stacking can expose a font's alignment weakness. Unicode cross-references this mark with spacing breve ˘ and Cyrillic kavyka ꙼; inverted breve ̑ and caron ̌ are separate marks.
Don't confuse it with
3Questions people ask
1Why did my two-character sequence become one letter?
It can be normalization: text can store the same displayed letter as one precomposed character or as a base plus mark. NFC, a standard way to normalize Unicode text, can combine the latter when a precomposed letter exists without changing its appearance.
How to type ̆
̆\0306Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.