Open-mid central unrounded vowel

The open-mid central unrounded vowel, or low-mid central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . The IPA symbol is not the digit or the Cyrillic small letter Ze. The symbol is instead a reversed Latinized variant of the lowercase epsilon, ɛ. The value was specified only in 1993; until then, was an alternative symbol for the mid central unrounded vowel.
The letter may be used with a raising diacritic, to denote the mid central unrounded vowel. It may also be used with a lowering diacritic, to denote the near-open central unrounded vowel.
Conversely,, the symbol for the mid central vowel may be used with a lowering diacritic to denote the open-mid central unrounded vowel, although that is more specifically written with an additional unrounding diacritic to explicitly denote the lack of rounding.