A macron, from Greek (makrón) meaning "long", is a diacritic ¯ placed over or under a vowel which was originally used to mark a long (for example heavy) syllable in Græco-Roman metrics, but has now been taken also to indicate that the vowel is long. The opposite is a breve ˘, used to indicate originally a short syllable and now also a short vowel. Distinctions between long and short vowels are usually phonemic. In the International Phonetic Alphabet the macron is use… (More on Macron)