What ᵘ means
It marks a brief or secondary u-like sound in phonetic transcription.
In the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA), superscript letters can mark very short or transitional vowels. Americanist notation—a system linguists use to write speech sounds—and notation based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can use ᵘ for the less prominent part of a diphthong. The surrounding convention determines its precise sound.
Why is ᵘ its own character?
Its raised position can carry phonetic meaning.
A styled u may lose its position when text moves between tools, and a reader may take it for ordinary typography. This encoded character preserves the position as text.
A missing box or unexpected shape points to font support; this text character is drawn by the reader’s font.
Where did this notation come from?
Its history comes from phonetic transcription systems.
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA), a system for recording sounds and tracing word histories in Uralic languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, was first published by Eemil Nestor Setälä in 1901. Its superscript marks could distinguish especially short or transitional sounds. Unicode’s 2003 encoding preserves this notation in digital text; that is the encoding date, not the notation’s beginning.
Specialist phonetic notation; outside transcription, the raised u can look like styling without its sound context.
Don’t swap it with ᵤ: one is raised, the other sits below the line.
Part of the collection
Who writes ᵘ
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What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsA very short or transitional vowel; the UPA convention supplies the precise sound.
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ᵘ show as a box on some devices?
Not every system ships a font for the Phonetic Extensions block. Where none is installed, the character shows as an empty box; adding a font such as Noto fixes it. The character itself is still correct and copies correctly.
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How to type or find ᵘ
- Search it as
- upa u · ipa superscript u · phonetic u · superscript u · diphthong u · subscript u
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ᵘ\1D58Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.