Modifier Letter Unaspirated

Modifier Letter Unaspirated at U+02ED is a small spacing phonetic mark used to show that a consonant is pronounced without aspiration, meaning without an audible burst of breath after its release. It belongs to the Spacing Modifier Letters block, whose characters act like letter-sized annotation signs rather than combining accents. Its main use is in phonetic transcription, especially in material based on the International Phonetic Alphabet or related traditions. In descriptions of languages such as Hindi, Thai, Korean, or Ancient Greek, it can distinguish an unaspirated stop from an aspirated one: a transcription may mark a plain p, t, or k as unaspirated when the contrast matters for pronunciation or analysis. In practice, this character is much less common than simply leaving aspiration unmarked, because unaspirated consonants are often treated as the default in IPA notation. It is most likely to appear in dictionaries, linguistic papers, fieldwork notes, pronunciation teaching materials, and digitized legacy transcriptions where the author wants the absence of aspiration to be explicit. It should not be confused with the modifier letter for aspiration, which indicates the opposite feature.