What ⏗ means
It marks a three-beat value in Greek poetic and musical notation.
Scansion—the marking of a poem's rhythm—uses it for a three-beat metrical position. In music, it can mark a syllable or note with that timing; it is not a general sign for three things.
Two forms of the sign are attested in antiquity. One appears in Anonyma de musica scripta Bellermanniana, an ancient treatise on meter and music.
Why was ⏗ made?
It records an extra beat when a long syllable is stretched.
Ancient Greek quantitative meter distinguishes syllable lengths. A musical setting could stretch a long syllable, usually two beats, to three; the triseme makes that timing visible in a transcription.
A 2025 discussion of setting the plays of Euripides, an ancient Greek playwright, to music describes debate about how closely surviving music followed poetic meter. That affects interpretation of a passage, not the sign's three-beat value.
How is ⏗ different from 𝉂?
⏗ stands alone; 𝉂 is made to attach to another character.
𝉂 is the combining Greek musical triseme. Substituting it for ⏗ can change spacing or make the sign appear missing in a font that does not support it.
If ⏗ appears as an empty box, the font lacks a usable glyph; the text still contains the same character.
Don't confuse it with
1Related characters
3
Questions 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
How to type or find ⏗
- Also called
- triseme · Greek metrical triseme
- Search it as
- metrical notation · Greek meter · Greek musical notation · three-beat mark · combining triseme
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⏗\23D7Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.