U+00AF "¯" Macron Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
¯
U+00AF "¯" Macron is a spacing diacritical mark that appears as a horizontal line positioned above a letter, historically used to indicate a long vowel sound in Latin and other languages, though in modern digital contexts it is often employed as an overline or for decorative text, such as creating strike-through effects or framing ASCII art, and it should not be confused with the similar looking combining macron (U+0304), as this version occupies its own character space and does not automatically attach to a preceding letter.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+00AF |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Macron |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Spacing Macron |
| Block | Latin-1 Supplement |
| General Category | Modifier Symbol |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Other Neutral |
| Decomposition Type | Compat |
| Decomposition Mapping | "SP" U+0020 Space "̄" U+0304 Combining Macron |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ¯ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ¯ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xC2 0xAF |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x00AF |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000000AF |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u00af |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFD Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| East Asian Width | Narrow |
| Case Ignorable | Yes |
| Changes When NFKC Casefolded | Yes |
| NFKC Casefold | "SP" U+0020 Space "̄" U+0304 Combining Macron |
| NFKC Simple Casefold | "SP" U+0020 Space "̄" U+0304 Combining Macron |
| Script | Common |
| Script Extensions | Common |
| Indic Syllabic Category | Other |
| Diacritic | Yes |
| Vertical Orientation | Rotated |
| Grapheme Base | Yes |
| Grapheme Cluster Break | Other |
| Word Break | Other |
| Sentence Break | Other |