ASCII code for the schwa?

July 30, 2004 9:29 AM

Anyone know the ASCII code for the schwa? 20 minutes of fruitless Googling and I give up.
posted by archimago to Writing & Language (18 answers total)

If it's not here, it probably doesn't have a code.
posted by cmonkey at 9:49 AM on July 30, 2004

what's a schwa?

ascii codes are limited to 7 bits and are listed here.
posted by andrew cooke at 9:49 AM on July 30, 2004

you mean ~? try & #126; without that spacem of course.
posted by Hackworth at 9:50 AM on July 30, 2004

do you mean html character entities?
posted by andrew cooke at 9:51 AM on July 30, 2004

I don't think it exists. Yourdictionary.com, for example, uses little images.
posted by gleuschk at 9:51 AM on July 30, 2004

I think you have to use Unicode #601 in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Check out the scwha at the top of the browser window (if your browser is Unicode compliant)
posted by jasper411 at 9:51 AM on July 30, 2004

what's a schwa?

Schwa.
posted by WolfDaddy at 1:07 PM on July 30, 2004

jasper411 wins: ə

ə works.
posted by zsazsa at 1:16 PM on July 30, 2004

thanks all. (That's a tilde, Hackworth). I've actually found a way around my problem.
posted by archimago at 1:17 PM on July 30, 2004

The schwa (an upside-down "e" used to denote the "uh" sound) character is not a part of the ASCII standard, or the extended-ASCII implementations I'm aware of (although it might be in MacSCII, but these days the Mac is mostly Unicode).

Looks like if you're willing to go outside of ASCII, you could manage Unicode or a character entity as others have said, but as far as ASCII goes you're out of luck.
posted by majick at 1:18 PM on July 30, 2004

Curses! That schwa shows up fine in Firefox in Linux, but not in IE in Windows 2000. Maybe W2K doesn't come with a full set of Unicode fonts.
posted by zsazsa at 1:31 PM on July 30, 2004

Depends what international support you have installed, I guess. I see that schwa just fine in Win2k/Firefox (but not in IE for some reason).
posted by neckro23 at 2:19 PM on July 30, 2004

schwa, tilde, whatever.
posted by Hackworth at 11:31 PM on July 30, 2004

?
posted by yerfatma at 7:22 AM on July 31, 2004

Damnit. Stupid preview vs. post character entry eating fuck-all.
posted by yerfatma at 7:22 AM on July 31, 2004

I thought the Schwa was that alien graphic.
posted by mecran01 at 7:59 AM on July 31, 2004

yeah, the schwa is that alien graphic, but it was a phonetic symbol before that.
posted by hattifattener at 1:07 PM on July 31, 2004

Metafilter: Stupid preview vs. post character entry eating fuck-all.
posted by andrew cooke at 1:23 PM on July 31, 2004