What ͂ means
It marks a rise then fall in pitch.
Polytonic Greek is a spelling system with several accent and breathing marks; breathing marks show whether an initial vowel begins with an h-like sound. The perispomeni combines the high pitch associated with the acute accent and the low pitch associated with the grave on one long vowel or diphthong (two vowel sounds in one syllable). In a written diphthong, the accent sits over the second vowel, while the combining mark follows its base letter in the text sequence.
Greek language scholars in Alexandria developed the accent system around 200 BCE to help readers recover Greek pitch and pronunciation. An ancient attribution credits the Greek scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, but it rests on a doubtful passage. A poetic papyrus from the second-century CE is an early surviving example. By the early Byzantine period, spoken Greek had shifted from pitch accent to stress accent, while written accents remained in use.
Specialist and historical: it belongs to polytonic Greek texts, especially in Greek study and historical editions.
A tilde-like curve alone cannot identify it; another combining mark may look the same.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1why does the Greek circumflex look like a tilde?
Font design controls its outline: this mark can appear as a circumflex, inverted breve, tilde, or occasionally macron.
More like this
12
How to type or find ͂
- Also called
- perispomeni · perispomenon · Greek circumflex
- Search it as
- circumflex · polytonic Greek · Greek pitch accent · tilde
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
͂\0342Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.