What ᪾ means
It encloses the letter together with its overstriking diacritic. In ExtIPA and German dialectology, it signals that the diacritic has a weaker effect on pronunciation.
Teuthonista, a way to transcribe German regional speech, developed in 19th-century dialectology; its journal appeared in 1924–25. The tradition also appears in Romance dialect studies in Switzerland and Italy.
Fonts set its exact height; around a descender such as ŋ, it may sit lower.
Don't confuse it with
4Questions 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 ᪾
Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 1ABE, then Alt+X to get ᪾.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “combining parentheses overlay”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 1abe, then Enter or Space.
HTML
᪾CSS
\1ABEHow to type combining parentheses overlay
Enter the base letter first, followed by U+1ABE as a separate combining character.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
᪾
HTML hex
᪾
CSS content
content: "\1ABE";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E1%AA%BE
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.