What ⸲ means
It marks nasalization in Palaeotype, a system for writing speech sounds.
That means pronouncing the marked vowel with air passing through the nose as well as the mouth. Linguist Alexander Ellis used Palaeotype to write down English speech. An 1868 example describes the glyph as a “turned apostrophe.”
Why does ⸲ appear in old names?
A different printer’s mark stood in for a small raised c.
A printer’s manual from 1755 describes this workaround for type that lacked the raised letter; a 1771 manual gives the same practice for Mac or Mc names. Early U.S. Supreme Court reports used it in names such as M‘Culloch from 1790. By later nineteenth-century printing, the convention shifted toward an apostrophe or plain Mac/Mc. This practice is documented in English-language printing.
In Palaeotype, it is a phonetic mark; in old printing, a similar raised mark points to a printer’s workaround.
In an old name, replacing the printer’s raised mark with an apostrophe can erase its distinction from ⸲.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2
Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does ⸲ 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
Collections with ⸲
1
How to type or find ⸲
- Also called
- turned apostrophe
- Search it as
- Palaeotype · nasalization · nasalization mark · Mac · Mc · M‘Culloch · superscript c · U+2E32
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
⸲\2E322E32 and convert it; the keystroke depends on the app and operating system.⸲ in HTML markup when you need the character rendered from an entity.Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.