U00AF

U+00AF is the Unicode code point for the macron, a diacritic mark used in Latin-script orthographies and phonetic transcription. The macron is a horizontal bar placed above a letter to indicate vowel length in many languages, and in some fonts the character ¯ can appear as a standalone symbol. In practical typography, the macron above a letter is often created by combining the base letter with a combining macron (U+0304) or by using a precomposed character such as ā, ē, ī, ō, or ū when available.

Encoding and representations: U+00AF is part of the Latin-1 Supplement block. In Unicode it is encoded as U+00AF; in UTF-8 it appears as the two-byte sequence 0xC2 0xAF. In HTML, the macron can be written with the named entity ¯ or with numeric references like ¯ or ¯.

Usage and examples: The macron marks long vowels in languages such as Māori, Hawaiian, Latvian-derived orthographies, and various transliteration schemes. It is commonly seen in modern Māori and Hawaiian orthographies to distinguish vowel length (for example, mā, mō). When a macron is needed but only ASCII is available, authors may render it with a combining macron after the base letter or use a precomposed character where supported (e.g., ā, ō).

Notes: Because fonts and input methods vary, the macron’s appearance can differ. For precise spelling, use the appropriate precomposed letter when available, or apply a combining macron with the base character as needed.