Ṝ is a vowel-like letter of Indic abugidas, often referred to as a "vocalic R̄".

In modern Indic scripts, Ṝ is derived from the early "Ashoka" Brahmi letter .

Like all Brahmic scripts, Tocharian Ṝ has an accompanying vowel mark for modifying a base consonant.

[2] Several identifiable styles of writing the Ṝ vowel sign can be found, most associated with a specific set of inscriptions from an artifact or diverse records from an historic period.

[3] As the earliest and most geometric style of Brahmi, the letters found on the Edicts of Ashoka and other records from around that time are normally the reference form for Brahmi letters, but given the lack of Ṝ vowel signs in early Brahmi, the reference image is normally back-formed to a geometric form of later styles, and the independent letter for Ṝ is derived from the short Ṛ .

The Tocharian Ṝ was very infrequently used, and only appears in the corpus in combination with a few base consonants.

It is derived from the Siddhaṃ letter , and is marked by the lack of horizontal head line and less geometric shape than its Devanagari counterpart, ॠ.

Ṝ is a non-attaching vowel sign, and does not alter the underlying consonant or contextually shape itself in any way.

No base consonants are altered in form when adding a vowel sign, and there are no consonant+vowel ligatures in Odia.

Ṝ from several modern-use scripts can also be found in legacy encodings, such as ISCII.