Length characters
ː
The length character (ː) similar to the colon (:) in the so-called International Phonetic Alphabet ( IPA for short ) indicates that the sound represented by the preceding letter must be pronounced long (stretched) .
The word "length character" serves as a generic term for three characters: the two expansion characters length characters (ː), semi-long characters (ˑ), and abbreviations (˘) of the IPA.
The IPA number of the character is 503 and the Unicode Standard Number ( UCS ) is U + 02D0. In X-SAMPA it can be represented with the ASCII character 58 and in HTML in a similar way with :
(U + 003A) - as an alternative - which basically corresponds to the common colon.
Examples of the use of the length character are the words: