A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the m, n and l in the English words rhythm, button and bottle, or is the nucleus of a syllable, like the r sound in the American pronunciation of work. To represent it, the understroke diacritic in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used, ⟨U+0329  ̩ COMBINING VERTICAL LINE BELOW⟩. It may be instead represented by an overstroke, ⟨U+030D  ̍ COMBINING VERTICAL LINE ABOVE⟩ if the symbol that it modifies has a descender, such as in [ŋ̍].