Open-mid central unrounded vowel

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Open-mid central unrounded vowel

The open-mid central unrounded vowel is a mid-to-low central vowel used in some languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet it is written as ɜ. This symbol was officially defined in 1993 and is not the digit 3 or the Cyrillic zhe; it is a rounded-back form of the lowercase epsilon (ɛ).

You can modify ɜ with diacritics:
- ɜ̝ raises the vowel toward a more mid central position.
- ɜ̞ lowers it toward a near-open central position.

The central vowel symbol ə can also be lowered with a diacritic to indicate open-mid central unrounded (ə̞). Sometimes this is written with an additional unrounding mark (ə̞͑) to explicitly show a lack of rounding. In general, this sound is unrounded—the lips do not round when articulating it.