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ē

latin small letter e with macron

Latin e with macron

The e macron ē marks a long vowel, but it has no single sound everywhere. Māori can use the length difference to change a word’s meaning; Latvian has two e sounds.

Text symbol
Search it as
ē · e macron · long e · Māori vowel length
Shows up in
Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws

What ē means

It marks vowel length. Māori can use long vowels to distinguish words. Latvian has two e sounds; ē marks length, while the word determines the sound.

Why is Māori sometimes written Maaori?

Type and computer limits led to variants.

The Latin spelling taught by early missionaries left Māori vowel length unmarked; Williams’s Māori dictionary first showed macrons in its fifth edition, in 1917.

Printing and computer limits encouraged unmarked (Maori), doubled (Maaori), and umlauted (Mäori) forms; macrons were widely supported online by the early 2000s.

Don't confuse it with

2
e
Latin Small Letter E
Plain e lacks the length mark, which matters in Māori and Latvian.
é
Latin Small Letter E With Acute
é has an acute accent, which slants upward; ē has a straight macron.

Questions people ask

1

Why does ē show as a box on some devices?

Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.

How to type ē

Windows (Word)
Alt+XType 0113, then Alt+X to get ē.
Windows
Win+Rrun charmap for the full table, or use the emoji picker's Ω symbols tab (Win + .).
macOS
Control+Command+SpaceOpen the character viewer and search “latin small letter e with macron”.
Linux
Ctrl+Shift+UType 0113, then Enter or Space.
HTML
ē
CSS
\0113
How to type ē
Hold e for ē if your keyboard offers it; with a Māori layout, type ~ then e.
Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
ē
HTML hex
ē
CSS content
content: "\0113";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%C4%93
1
On screen
1
Code points
1
JS .length
2
UTF-8 bytes

A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

Families this belongs to

1

Latin letters1,379 symbols

ABCDEFGHIJKL