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A macron (/ ˈ m æ k r ɒ n, ˈ m eɪ-/ MAK-ron, MAY-) is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar ¯ placed above a letter, usually a vowel.Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) 'long' because it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics.
The only diacritic native to Modern English is the two dots (representing a vowel hiatus): its usage has tended to fall off except in certain publications and particular cases. [3] [a] Proper nouns are not generally counted as English terms except when accepted into the language as an eponym – such as Geiger–Müller tube.
A macron is a diacritic ¯ placed over a vowel originally to indicate that the vowel is long. When editing a Wikipedia page, macron characters appear below the edit box, and can be inserted into the edit box by clicking the appropriate character (in JavaScript-enabled browsers). A macron can also be input directly from the keyboard.
Ā, lowercase ā ("A with macron"), is a grapheme, a Latin A with a macron, used in several orthographies.Ā is used to denote a long A.Examples are the Baltic languages (e.g. Latvian), Polynesian languages, including Māori and Moriori, some romanizations of Japanese, Persian, Pashto, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (which represents a long A sound) and Arabic, and some Latin texts (especially for ...
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός ( diakritikós , "distinguishing"), from διακρίνω ( diakrínō , "to distinguish").
Macron (diacritic), a straight bar placed over a letter Macron below , a macron placed below a letter Overline , a horizontal line over two or more letters, sometimes mistakenly called a macron
Unicode maps the overline-like character from ISO/IEC 8859-1 and code page 850 to the U+00AF ¯ MACRON symbol mentioned above. In a reversal of its official name (and compatibility decomposition), it is much wider than an actual macron diacritic over most letters, and actually wider than U+203E ‾ OVERLINE in most fonts.
However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only the long vowels. It is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short. If the vowel length is unknown, a breve as well as a macron are used in historical linguistics (Ā̆ ā̆ Ē̆ ē̆ Ī̆ ī̆ Ō̆ ō̆ Ū̆ ū̆ Ȳ̆ ȳ̆). In Cyrillic script, a breve is used for Й.