Open-mid vowel
type of vowel sound
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.
Examples
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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Open-mid vowel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.