What ̻ means
It marks a consonant made with the tongue blade.
In t̻, the t is made with the tongue blade, the broad front surface just behind the tip. The contrasting apical articulation uses the tongue tip. Phoneticians use the mark to record an articulation, not to prescribe one pronunciation for every speaker.
Why does ̻ look like a square?
IPA prefers a horizontal rectangle, but fonts vary.
The IPA archive dates its first alphabet to 1888; a 1912 chart uses “point and blade” to describe tongue contact. The rectangular laminal form appears in the 1989 Kiel revision. Unicode encoded the notation; it did not create the articulatory distinction.
The IPA reported in 2016 that some fonts drew the mark as a small square. That can resemble the voiceless under-ring ◌̥, which marks a sound made without vocal-fold vibration.
How do I type combining square below?
Type the base letter first, then add the combining mark.
A combining mark applies to the preceding letter. On its own, it may appear over a dotted circle or as an uncombined glyph; keep it next to its base when editing a transcription.
A specialist phonetic mark: precise in an IPA transcription, opaque in ordinary chat.
The square-like mark records tongue contact; the under-ring marks voicelessness.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
3
Combination ideas
2Questions 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.
More like this
9
Collections with ̻
1
How to type or find ̻
- Also called
- laminal diacritic · subscript square
- Search it as
- ipa · laminal · phonetic · diacritic · subscript · rectangle · subsquare
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
̻\033BCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.