Unreleased stop

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An unreleased stop or plosive is a plosive consonant without an audible release burst. That is, the oral tract is blocked to pronounce the consonant, and there is no audible indication of when that occlusion ends. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, unreleased consonants are denoted with an upper-right corner above the consonant symbol: [p̚], [t̚], [k̚].

In English, the first in a cluster of plosives is unreleased, such as in apt [æp̚t], ant [æn̚t].

In languages such as Cantonese, Min Nan, Korean, Malay and Thai, final stops are not released: mak [mak̚].

Some languages which are reported to have unreleased final stops turn out to have short voiceless nasal releases instead. Vietnamese is an example.

Released plosives, on the other hand, are not normally indicated. If a final plosive is aspirated, the aspiration symbol [ʰ] is sufficient to indicate the release. Otherwise, the 'unaspirated' diacritic from the Extended IPA may be employed for this: apt [æp̚t⁼].