Tie (typography)

The tie is a symbol in the shape of an arc similar to a large breve, used in Greek, phonetic alphabets, and Z notation.

This is not uniformly applied, however; some letters corresponding to common digraphs in English, such as SH for Ш and KH for Х do not employ the tie.

(Its companion mark was the hypodiastole, which showed that a series of letters should be understood as two separate words.

When a syllable was sung with three notes, this slur was used in combination with a double point and a diseme overline.

[4] In musical score engraving, the undertie symbol is called an "elision slur" or "lyric slur",[5] and is used to indicate synalepha: the elision of two or more spoken syllables into a single note; this is in contrast to the more common melisma, the extension of a single spoken syllable over multiple sung notes.

Although rare in English texts, synalepha is often encountered in musical lyrics written in the Romance languages.

In use, the undertie is placed between the words of the lyric that are to be sung as one note to prevent the space between them being interpreted as a syllable break.