Combining Latin Small Letter C

It marks an abbreviation whose missing letters come from the word.

Read it with its base letter and the rest of the word, not as an independent c. The Paris Bible Project’s medieval Latin transcription guide records nͨ and hͨ as forms for the Latin word nec (“nor”); the word and manuscript convention determine the expansion.

The wider practice of superscript abbreviation has Roman precedents and predates Christianity. After the Western Roman Empire fell, regional forms diverged; the Carolingian reform made them more regular, and by the High Middle Ages abbreviation systems had become complex. They saved writing time and costly page space. This superscript-letter family appears chiefly in medieval Germanic manuscripts, with some use continuing into the nineteenth century.

How should I type ͨ?

Type the base letter first, then append ͨ.

Put the mark immediately after its base letter, without a space. In code, append \u0368 or ͨ in the same text run.

On its own, it may render as a dotted-circle specimen or as a detached mark. The circle is a display aid, not part of the text; placement depends on the base glyph, font, and shaping support.