What ᷄ means
It marks a vowel’s high-rising pitch contour in IPA.
The IPA macron-acute sits over the vowel whose pitch contour it describes. Pitch starts high, then rises; the strokes work together as one contour instruction, not as separate length and stress marks.
On its own, ᷄ lacks the base vowel and notation context needed to identify the sound being described.
Where did ᷄ come from?
It belongs to a family of phonetic pitch-contour marks.
A published attestation appears in the 1999 IPA Handbook; related contour-mark examples date to 1992 and 1993. Together, they place ᷄ in a developing phonetic notation tradition rather than everyday punctuation.
The related forms ᷅, ᷆, ᷇, ᷈ and ᷉ were presented alongside it as a contour-mark set; each describes a different pitch path.
Why does ᷄ render incorrectly?
A misplaced ᷄ is usually a font or layout problem.
A combining mark needs a base letter and software that can position it; unsupported sequences can float, overlap, or break. Try the same vowel-plus-mark sequence in Charis or Doulos SIL to check font support.
Praat, phonetic-analysis software, uses \ef\-' after the vowel for the documented high-rising example ɛ᷄.
Specialist phonetic notation; its value depends on the transcription system.
If it floats, check the base letter and font before reading a new meaning.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsDon't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
1Questions 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.
How to type ᷄
᷄\1DC4Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.