| Aspirated | |
|---|---|
| ◌ʰ | |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | ʰ |
| Unicode (hex) | U+02B0 |
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most Indian and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive, while in Arabic and Persian, all stops are aspirated.