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is a diacritic ¯ placed over a vowel originally to indicate that the vowel is long. The opposite is a breve ˘, used to indicate a short vowel. These distinctions are usually phonemic.

In Old English, the macron was used in this way (the Beowulf manuscript is a good example of this). In Latvian it is used to indicate a long A sound. In Hawaiian (where it is known as the kahako) it is used to indicate long vowels, which in turn influence the placement of accent stress in words. Early writing in Mori did not distinguish vowel length. Some have advocated that the double vowel orthography be used to distinguish vowel length. However, the Māori Language Commission (Te Taura Whiri) advocate a macron be used to designate a long vowel. The use of the macron is now wide spread in modern Māori writings, though many people use a diaeresis mark instead (e.g. Mäori instead of Māori) due to lack of support on computers.

It is also used in many dictionaries and textbooks to mark vowel length in languages that do not feature this diacritic in everyday use, for example it is used in the Hepburn transcription of Japanese to indicate a long vowel, as in kotsu (交通) 'traffic' as opposed to kotsu (骨) 'bone' or 'knack (fig.)'. It is often used in modern Latin dictionaries to mark vowel length, in conjuction with the breve.

It is also used in some languages to indicate things other than length. For example, in PinyinPinyin (, pinyin) literally means "join together sounds" (a less literal translation being "phoneticize", "spell" or "transcription") in Chinese and usually refers to Hany pinyin (, literal meaning: " Han language pinyin"), which is a system of romanizati it is used to indicate the first of the four tones in MandarinThis article is on all of the Northern Chinese dialects. For the standardized spoken Chinese language, see Standard Mandarin. Mandarin or Beifanghua (literally "Northern speech"), is a category of Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southw ChineseThe Chinese language (/, /, or ; pinyin: hany, huay, or zhongwen) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although most Chinese view the many varieties of spoken Chinese as a single language, regional variations in spoken language are compara.

In UnicodeIn computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. This includes all scripts still in active use today, many scripts known only by scholars, and sy, "combining macron" is one of the combining diacritical markCombining diacritical marks are Unicode characters that are intended to modify other characters (see Diacritic). The main block of combining diacritics is U+0300 U+036F. They are also present in many other blocks of Unicode characters. In Unicode, diacrits, its code is U+0304 (in HTMLHyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for creating web pages, that is, information presented on the World Wide Web. Defined as a simple "application" of SGML, which is used by organizations with complex publishing requirements, HT, ̄ or ̄). There are also several precomposed characterPrecomposed character is a Unicode entity that can be decomposed into a canonically equivalent string of several other characters. Typically, a precomposed character is decomposed into to the main character and a combining diacritical mark. Syn decomposabs; their HTMLHyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for creating web pages, that is, information presented on the World Wide Web. Defined as a simple "application" of SGML, which is used by organizations with complex publishing requirements, HT/ Unicode numbers are as in the table to the right.

The row before the last is the letter Uu with macron and diaeresis, used in pinyin to indicate the letter ü pronounced with the first tone.

The final row is the letter Yy with macron, used sometimes in teaching Latin.