What ᵝ means
It modifies how a neighboring sound is pronounced.
After vowels, it can mark lip rounding with the lips held together, not pushed forward; after consonants, beta-like coloring or a release with audible friction.
John Laver used superscript beta in his 1994 textbook Principles of Phonetics; a 2020 Unicode proposal documents the example.
A phonetic text character; a blank box means the font lacks its glyph.
Who writes ᵝ
Loading…
What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsCompressed lip rounding.
Don't confuse it with
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ᵝ 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
10
How to type or find ᵝ
- Also called
- superscript beta
- Search it as
- IPA beta · compressed lip rounding
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
Windows (Word)
Windows
HTML
ᵝCSS
\1D5DUnicode input
How to type ᵝ: use a character map or an app's Unicode entry; there is no standard keyboard key.
Preserve form
NFKC normalization can replace it with ordinary β.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
ᵝ
HTML hex
ᵝ
CSS content
content: "\1D5D";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%E1%B5%9D
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
3
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.