What ͦ means
It marks a raised o in manuscript transcription.
“Superscript” means written smaller and higher than the line. In digital text, ͦ is a combining mark: place it immediately after the base letter, and the font positions it over that letter. Medieval scribes also raised letters in abbreviated spellings to save writing space.
This mark belongs to a wider family of raised-letter conventions associated chiefly with medieval Germanic manuscripts, with examples recorded as late as the 19th century.
Why does its reading change with the letter?
The base and the edition’s convention set its reading.
Some Middle High German editions use a raised o after u for the written vowel sequence “uo.” The Paris Bible Project expands qͦ as “quo”; the Menota handbook for medieval-text transcription expands bͦg as “b(or)g.” These are separate editorial conventions, not one universal rule.
A specialist editorial mark: its reading comes from the manuscript’s transcription system.
Part of the collection
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsIt can represent the written vowel sequence “uo”; the raised mark is read as o, not as a ring.
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
6
Questions people ask
1why does ͦ look broken alone?
Because it has no preceding base. Software may display the mark uncombined or use a dotted circle as a placeholder; that is fallback positioning, not a second symbol.
More like this
9
How to type or find ͦ
- Also called
- superscript o · interlinear o · o above
- Search it as
- combining o · scribal o · medieval abbreviation · manuscript transcription · ring above · umlaut
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ͦ\0366Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.