Extra-short

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses a breve, [  ̆ ], to indicate a speech sound (usually a vowel) with less than normal or extra short duration. That is, [ă] is a very short vowel with the quality of [a].

An example from English is the short schwa of the word police [pʰə̆ˈliˑs]. This is typical of vowel reduction.

Before 1989, the breve was used for a non-syllabic vowel (that is, part of a diphthong), which is now indicated by an inverted breve placed under the vowel letter, as in eye [aɪ̯]. It is also sometimes used for flap consonants which do not have dedicated symbols in the IPA, since a flap is in effect a very brief stop.