Latin Letter Glottal Stop

Latin Letter Glottal Stop at U+0294 represents the glottal stop consonant, the brief closure in the throat heard in the middle of English “uh-oh.” It is a printable letter in the IPA Extensions block, where it functions as a phonetic symbol rather than punctuation. Its most common use is in the International Phonetic Alphabet for transcribing speech sounds. Linguists, dictionaries, language textbooks, and speech-therapy materials use it for a voiceless glottal plosive, as in phonetic transcriptions of Arabic hamza, Hawaiian ʻokina-like sounds, or the glottal break that may replace /t/ in some English pronunciations. It also appears in practical orthographies and language documentation for communities whose writing systems mark a glottal consonant with an IPA-derived character. In comparative linguistics, field notes, and grammars, it may be used directly in word forms to distinguish meaningful contrasts, especially in Indigenous-language and minority-language materials. This character is easy to confuse with the question mark, apostrophe, modifier letter glottal stop, or turned comma used in some alphabets. Those lookalikes can matter in searching, sorting, and text processing because they are different Unicode characters with different linguistic roles.