U+02D8 "˘" Breve Unicode Character

U+02D8 "˘" Breve is a diacritical mark shaped like a small curved line that resembles a parenthesis rotated 90 degrees, often placed above a vowel to indicate a short pronunciation or a specific phonetic value in various languages and transcription systems. Originating from Latin and Greek usage, it appears in Romanian, for example, above the letter "a" to denote the sound /ə/, and is also employed in linguistic alphabets like the International Phonetic Alphabet to signify a briefly articulated sound. The breve is distinct from the similar-looking caron or háček, as its curve points upward rather than resembling an inverted circumflex, and it is encoded in Unicode primarily for use in text processing and typography where precise phonetic or orthographic representation is needed.

General Properties

Code Point	U+02D8
Version Added	1.1
Name	Breve
Unicode 1.0 Name	Spacing Breve
Block	Spacing Modifier Letters
General Category	Modifier Symbol
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Other Neutral
Decomposition Type	Compat
Decomposition Mapping	"SP" U+0020 Space "̆" U+0306 Combining Breve

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	˘
HTML Hex Encoding	˘
UTF-8 Encoding	0xCB 0x98
UTF-16 Encoding	0x02D8
UTF-32 Encoding	0x000002D8
C/C++/Java Escape	\u02d8

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Ambiguous (Alphabetic or Ideographic)
East Asian Width	Ambiguous
Case Ignorable	Yes
Changes When NFKC Casefolded	Yes
NFKC Casefold	"SP" U+0020 Space "̆" U+0306 Combining Breve
NFKC Simple Casefold	"SP" U+0020 Space "̆" U+0306 Combining Breve
Script	Common
Script Extensions	Common
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
Diacritic	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Other
Sentence Break	Other