What ˟ means
It marks a word melody called accent II.
Swedish can distinguish words through pitch—the way your voice rises and falls—as well as through individual sounds. For example, ˈanden means “the duck” and ˟anden means “the spirit” in this notation. The spelling is the same; the melody distinguishes them. The exact pitch pattern varies with dialect, so the cross is not an instruction to raise your voice in one fixed way.
The mark belongs to pronunciation transcriptions, which show how words sound, rather than ordinary Swedish spelling. It takes up its own character position immediately before the syllable. To reproduce a transcription, keep ˟ separate: replacing it with a raised x or placing an x above a vowel gives a different character.
A technical pronunciation mark; it has no established conversational tone.
Part of collections
Don't confuse it with
3
A combining x above a letter. The dotted circle shows the attachment position; ˟ instead stands separately before a syllable.
Related characters
1
Worth knowing
- Mattias Ellert’s 1998 encoding proposal cites a 1949 International Phonetic Association reference and a 1968 Swedish phonetics book: the cross had a printed life before its digital encoding.
More like this
10
How to type or find ˟
- Search it as
- cross accent · Swedish pitch accent · accent II · grave accent · pronunciation mark · U+02DF
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
˟\02DFCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.