Ideographic Entering Tone Mark

It marks the entering tone, a historical category of Chinese pronunciation. The category names syllables whose older form ended with a brief stop sound such as p, t, or k. The mark classifies a reading; it does not give one fixed pitch value.

Chinese four-corner tone marks use a circle or half-circle at one of a character’s four corners to show its tone category and help distinguish readings. The method is documented from the Song dynasty. The earliest commonly cited account of four tone categories is associated with the scholar Shen Yue (441–513); 〭 marks the lower-right entering category.

Mandarin redistributed many historical entering-tone words among modern tone categories. Cantonese and some other southern Chinese varieties retain more syllables ending in stops, so the old label does not match one shared modern pitch across varieties.

Why does 〭 float?

It is a combining mark for the character whose reading it labels. Unicode treats it as a nonspacing mark, so the intended sequence is the character followed by 〭. Without a base character or font support for mark positioning, it can appear detached.

How do I type 〭?

Place it after its base Han character. 〭 forms a base-plus-mark sequence, not a precomposed letter.