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 ⟨ɜ⟩. The IPA symbol is neither the digit ⟨3⟩ nor Cyrillic small letter Ze, which arose from the Greek letter zeta, Ζ ζ), but a reversed Latinized variant of the lowercase epsilon, ɛ. The value was specified only in 1993; before that, it was transcribed ⟨ɛ̈⟩.