What ˗ means
It marks a retracted, or backed, sound. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), ˗ tells readers to pronounce the marked sound farther back in the mouth than the same sound without the mark. It marks pronunciation, not subtraction.
The IPA took shape in the late 19th century. A major revision agreed at Kiel in 1989 was a turning point toward combining marks for retraction; ˗ remains the spacing form when a mark below the letter cannot fit.
Why is ˗ written after the letter?
It has its own space after the base letter. The combining retracted mark attaches underneath the modified letter; ˗ advances as a separate character after it when the space below is crowded or unavailable.
The ends of ˗ may have small serifs, so some fonts make it look less like an ordinary hyphen.
Specialist phonetic notation; outside a transcription, it reads as a technical mark rather than ordinary punctuation.
For subtraction, use . ˗ tells a phonetics reader that a sound is backed.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
6
Combining retracted mark; it attaches below the base letter. ˗ is the separate spacing form written after it.
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Does ˗ add a separate sound?
No. It modifies how the preceding sound is articulated; it is not pronounced as a separate sound.
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13
How to type or find ˗
- Search it as
- IPA retraction mark · phonetic minus sign · retracted diacritic · backed articulation · backing mark · spacing phonetic mark · combining minus below · hyphen minus
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
˗\02D7˗; it produces ˗, not the combining .Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.