In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of his or her mouth, and say tore ([tʰɔɹ]) and then store ([stɔɹ]). One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with tore that one does not get with store. In most dialects of English, the t is aspirated in tore and unaspirated in store.
The diacritic for aspiration in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a superscript "h", [ʰ] . Unaspirated consonants are not normally marked explicitly, but there is a diacritic for non-aspiration in the Extensions to the IPA, the superscript equal sign, [⁼].
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