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˹

modifier letter begin high tone

High-Tone Opener

˹ opens a high-pitch stretch in Uralic transcription; ˺ closes it. A 2021 phraseology paper also uses the pair around idioms—fixed expressions whose meaning is not simply literal.

Text symbol
Search it as
UPA · FUT · high tone · high-pitch bracket
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What ˹ means

In UPA, ˹ is the high-tone opener.

Place ˹ before and ˺ after the high-pitch passage; an overline can mark the same stretch. UPA (Uralic Phonetic Alphabet), also called FUT (Finno-Ugric Transcription), is a specialist way to write speech sounds in Uralic languages, including Finnish and Sámi.

UPA grew from Setälä's 1901 proposal. A 2002 Unicode proposal reproduces this exact mark in examples from 1939, 1956, and 1958; those attest use by then, not its origin. A 2022 Oxford guide uses the International Phonetic Alphabet for present-day examples but keeps FUT for reconstructed forms, inferred from historical evidence.

Don't confuse it with

4
˥
Modifier Letter Extra-High Tone Bar
shares “high”, “letter”, “modifier”
˦
Modifier Letter High Tone Bar
shares “high”, “letter”, “modifier”
˺
Modifier Letter End High Tone
shares “high”, “letter”, “modifier”
˻
Modifier Letter Begin Low Tone
shares “begin”, “letter”, “modifier”

Questions people ask

1

Why 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.

How to type ˹

Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 02F9, then Alt+X to get ˹.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “modifier letter begin high tone”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 02f9, then Enter or Space.
HTML
˹
CSS
\02F9
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
˹
HTML hex
˹
CSS content
content: "\02F9";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%CB%B9
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
2
UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

1

Accents & marks659 symbols

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