A curved mark [*] used commonly to indicate the short quantity of a vowel.

The great ant thrush of Sumatra (Pitta gigas), which has a very short tail.

A curved mark placed over the vowel to indicate the short sound.

a diacritical mark (u-curved) placed over a vowel to indicate a short sound

In prosody, a breve is the mark placed over a syllable in a line of verse to indicate that it is short or unstressed. See also macron and meter.

A breve (Latin brevis "short, brief") is a diacritical mark Ë˜, shaped like a little round cup, designed to indicate a short vowel, as opposed to the macron Â¯ which indicates long vowels. It is often used this way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, old Greek and some other languages, such as Tuareg. (However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only – but all – the long vowels: it is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short.)