What ǁ means
It represents a lateral click consonant. The tongue seals against the roof of the mouth, then releases along one or both sides to make this kind of click.
Linguists use ǁ in IPA transcription, and some African-language orthographies also use it as a letter. In ordinary Zulu spelling, the corresponding lateral click is written x; ǁ is the IPA notation for its sound.
How is ǁ used in transcription?
It marks the click; nearby marks can add pronunciation details. A transcription may place another letter or a diacritic beside ǁ to show voicing, nasality, or another feature.
TIPA, a system for typesetting IPA, uses || as an input shortcut for ǁ. As of 2026, this shortcut produces one lateral-click character in the finished text.
Specialist: use ǁ in IPA transcription or an orthography that writes clicks.
Use ‖ for the prosodic break; ǁ is the click letter.
Part of collections
Who writes ǁ
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Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ǁ 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
11
Collections with ǁ
4
How to type or find ǁ
- Also called
- double pipe · alveolar lateral click
- Search it as
- lateral click · IPA click · click consonant · Zulu x click · ǁ
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ǁ\01C1Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.