U+025B "ɛ" Latin Small Letter Open E Unicode Character

U+025B "ɛ" Latin Small Letter Open E is a phonetic symbol representing a mid front unrounded vowel sound, like the "e" in the English word "bed." It is widely used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for transcribing speech sounds across various languages, including French and many West African languages. In addition to its phonetic role, this character appears in the orthographies of some natural languages, such as Ewe and Akan, to denote a distinct vowel phoneme. Its visual form is a lowercase epsilon derived from the Greek letter, and it is distinct from the similar-looking Latin small letter E in both shape and function.

General Properties

Code Point	U+025B
Version Added	1.1
Name	Latin Small Letter Open E
Unicode 1.0 Name	Latin Small Letter Epsilon
Block	IPA Extensions
General Category	Lowercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	ɛ
HTML Hex Encoding	ɛ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xC9 0x9B
UTF-16 Encoding	0x025B
UTF-32 Encoding	0x0000025B
C/C++/Java Escape	\u025b

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
NFKC Quick Check	Yes
NFKD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Alphabetic
Lowercase	Yes
Simple Uppercase Code Point	"Ɛ" U+0190 Latin Capital Letter Open E
Simple Titlecase Code Point	"Ɛ" U+0190 Latin Capital Letter Open E
Uppercase Code Point	"Ɛ" U+0190 Latin Capital Letter Open E
Titlecase Code Point	"Ɛ" U+0190 Latin Capital Letter Open E
Cased	Yes
Changes When Casemapped	Yes
Changes When Titlecased	Yes
Changes When Uppercased	Yes
Script	Latin
Script Extensions	Latin
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
ID Start	Yes
XID Start	Yes
ID Continue	Yes
XID Continue	Yes
Alphabetic	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Alphabetic letter
Sentence Break	Lower