Ə

This article is about the Latin derived letter. For the vowel represented by ə in IPA, see Schwa. For the Cyrillic letter, see Schwa (Cyrillic).

"Ǝ" redirects here. For the Eminem video collection, see E (video).

Ə or ə is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and minuscule forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule ǝ is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet and some alphabets based on the African reference alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule Ǝ, based on a horizontally flipped majuscule E.

The letter was used in the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, for example, in Janalif for the Tatar language in the 1920s-1930s.

In the Latin Azerbaijani and Chechen alphabets, Ə represents the near-open front unrounded vowel, /æ/. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, minuscule ə is used to represent the mid central vowel (see schwa).

In the Latin transliteration of Avestan, the corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron, Ə̄/ə̄.

Unicode encodings

In Unicode, the different letters are encoded:

• U+018F Ə latin capital letter schwa (HTML: Ə This is defined a majuscule)
• U+0259 ə latin small letter schwa (HTML: ə).
• Nigerian majuscule: U+018E Ǝ latin capital letter reversed e (HTML: Ǝ In the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet).
• Nigerian minuscule: U+01DD ǝ latin small letter turned e (HTML: ǝ In the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet).
• Used in Avestan, schwa-macron is the combination U+0259 ə latin small letter schwa (HTML: ə) U+0304  ̄  combining macron (HTML: ̄).
• Not to be confused with U+2203 ∃ there exists (HTML: ∃ ∃ as a mathematical symbol).

When using ə in Unicode, the Azerbaijani language has problems with the ISO/IEC Turkish encoding, so sometimes ä has been used instead, as in the Tatar language and Turkmen language.

In Windows, the uppercase "Ə" is written by holding the "Alt" key and pressing 399 on the number pad at the right side of the keyboard, then releasing "Alt". The lowercase "ə" can be written using the number 601 instead. If using a Compose key in Linux, it is written by pressing "Compose" and 'e' twice.

See also

• Schwa
• Schwa (Cyrillic)
• Existential quantification uses the ∃ symbol

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646