A modifier letter, in the

Unicode Standard Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 cha ...

, is a letter or symbol typically written next to another letter that it modifies in some way. They generally function like

diacritics A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

, changing the sound-values of the letter it is next to (usually the letter preceding it but sometimes the following letter instead). However, unlike diacritics, they do not combine with the character that they modify, but instead are displayed as separate characters on their own, such as subscripts or superscripts. Like

combining character In digital typography, combining characters are Character (computing), characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritic, diacritical marks (including c ...

s, they are often used in technical

phonetic transcription Phonetic transcription (also known as Phonetic script or Phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phonetics'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the ...

al systems to make phonetic distinctions.

See also

Further reading