Open-mid central rounded vowel

Open-mid central rounded vowel
ɞ
IPA number395
Audio sample
source · help
Encoding
Entity (decimal)ɞ
Unicode (hex)U+025E
X-SAMPA3\
Braille
Front Central Back
Close
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open

Legend: unrounded  rounded

The open-mid central rounded vowel, or low-mid central rounded vowel, is a vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɞ⟩. The symbol is called closed reversed epsilon. It was added to the IPA in 1993; before that, this vowel was transcribed ⟨ɔ̈⟩.

IPA charts were first published with this vowel transcribed as a closed epsilon, ⟨ʚ⟩ (that is, a closed variant of ⟨ɛ⟩, much as the high-mid vowel letter ⟨ɵ⟩ is a closed variant of ⟨e⟩), and this variant made its way into Unicode as U+029A ʚ LATIN SMALL LETTER CLOSED OPEN E. The IPA charts were later changed to the current closed reversed epsilon ⟨ɞ⟩, and this was adopted into Unicode as U+025E ɞ LATIN SMALL LETTER CLOSED REVERSED OPEN E.