Close-mid back unrounded vowel

The close-mid back unrounded vowel, or high-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ⟨ɤ⟩, called "ram's horn." This symbol is distinct from the symbol for the voiced velar fricative, ⟨ɣ⟩, which has a descender, but some texts use this symbol for the voiced velar fricative.

Before the 1989 IPA Convention, the symbol for the close-mid back unrounded vowel was ⟨⟩, sometimes called "baby gamma", which has a flat top; this symbol was in turn derived from and replaced the inverted small capital A, ⟨ᴀ⟩, that represented the sound before the 1928 revision to the IPA. The symbol was again revised to be ⟨⟩, "ram's horn", with a rounded top, in order to better differentiate it from the Latin gamma ⟨ɣ⟩.

Unicode provides U+0264 ɤ LATIN SMALL LETTER RAMS HORN, but in some fonts this character may appear as a "baby gamma" instead. The superscript IPA version is U+10791 𐞑 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL RAMS HORN. As of Unicode 16.0, there exists a capital ram's horn at U+A7CB Ɤ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER RAMS HORN ⟨⟩.