Latin Small Letter Turned T

The Latin Small Letter Turned T at U+0287 is a lowercase Latin letter form used mainly in phonetic transcription, and it is part of the IPA Extensions block. It represents a t-shaped symbol rotated 180 degrees, not an upside-down styling effect applied to an ordinary t. Its primary real-world use is in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiceless dental click, a speech sound made with the tongue against the teeth. It appears in phonetic descriptions of languages with click consonants, especially in southern African language documentation, field linguistics, dictionaries, and academic grammars. The letter also occurs in specialist phonetics data, language-learning materials, and corpus annotations where exact pronunciation matters more than ordinary spelling. It can be confused visually with playful “upside-down text” versions of t, but in linguistic text it is a distinct letter with a specific IPA value.