Close-mid vowel

IPA: Vowels

	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

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Legend: unrounded • rounded

A close-mid vowel (also mid-close vowel, high-mid vowel, mid-high vowel or half-close vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned about one third of the way from a close vowel to an open vowel.¹

The close-mid vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

• close-mid front unrounded vowel [e]
• close-mid front rounded vowel [ø]
• close-mid central unrounded vowel [ɘ] (older publications may use ⟨ë⟩)
• close-mid central rounded vowel [ɵ] (older publications may use ⟨ö⟩)
• close-mid back unrounded vowel [ɤ]
• close-mid back rounded vowel [o]

Other close-mid vowels can be indicated with diacritics of relative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels.