Combining Plus Sign Above

It marks an articulation made farther forward in the mouth.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a system for writing speech sounds, ᫈ modifies the preceding letter. The plus is an instruction about how a sound is articulated, not an arithmetic sign. Advanced or fronted means the sound is made farther forward in the mouth.

A Unicode proposal reproduces printed examples from Kelly & Local (1989) and Penhallurick (1991). In them, the plus is raised to clear an underdot or a letter's descender. Unicode encoded the above-position form in 2021; these examples show earlier use, not when the form was invented.

Why is the plus above instead of below?

It leaves room below the letter.

It is a positional variant of the usual below-position plus, so the placement changes but the phonetic reading stays the same. The above mark clears an underdot, another diacritic, or a letter with a descender. In the documented examples, it solves a layout problem rather than adding a second value.

How do I type the plus above?

Enter it after the character it modifies.

In a Unicode-aware editor, use its code-point entry method; in source code, use the language's Unicode escape. Keep it immediately after its base character, as in a᫈.