Open-mid vowel
Type of vowel sound
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i y | ɨ ʉ | ɯ u |
| Near-close | ɪ ʏ | ʊ | |
| Close-mid | e ø | ɘ ɵ | ɤ o |
| Mid | e̞ ø̞ | ə | ɤ̞ o̞ |
| Open-mid | ɛ œ | ɜ ɞ | ʌ ɔ |
| Near-open | æ | ɐ | |
| Open | a ɶ | ä | ɑ ɒ |
- IPA help
- audio
- full chart
- template
Legend: unrounded • rounded
An open-mid vowel (also mid-open vowel, low-mid vowel, mid-low vowel or half-open vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned approximately one third of the way from an open vowel to a close vowel.
01Examples
Some of the open-mid vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
- open-mid front unrounded vowel [ɛ]
- open-mid front rounded vowel [œ]
- open-mid central unrounded vowel [ɜ] (older publications may use ⟨ɛ̈⟩)
- open-mid central rounded vowel [ɞ] (older publications may use ⟨ɔ̈⟩)
- open-mid back unrounded vowel [ʌ]
- open-mid back rounded vowel [ɔ]
Other open-mid vowels can be indicated with diacritics of relative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Open-mid vowel”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.