What ᵟ means
In UPA transcription, it is the raised modifier form of Greek δ.
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) was developed to record and compare Uralic languages. In this system, superscript letters mark very short sounds or transitions between sounds.
The UPA tradition began with a publication in 1901 and was revised in the 1970s. A 2002 Unicode proposal lists both δ and ᵟ among its symbols.
Why is ᵟ raised?
The raised position is part of its phonetic meaning.
Unicode treats phonetic modifier letters as spacing characters with their own meaning, not letters raised by formatting. In plain text, ᵟ is a character of its own; shrinking or styling δ does not create it.
For the voiced dental fricative—the voiced “th” sound in English “this”—UPA uses δ, while the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses eth ð. This is a difference between transcription systems, not two interchangeable forms of ᵟ.
Specialist phonetic notation; use ᵟ only when a transcription system calls for this raised modifier form.
Do not substitute baseline δ: UPA uses the raised form for a very short or transitional sound.
Don't confuse it with
1Questions people ask
1Does ᵟ render everywhere?
No. Some fonts do not include it; fonts that do may draw its outline, size, or vertical position differently.
How to type ᵟ
ᵟ\1D5FCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.