How Do I Mark a Long Vowel Sound in Microsoft Word Documents?

Microsoft Word 2013 comes with many symbols that you can easily insert into a document. Symbol choices in Word include vowels with a macron symbol, a horizontal bar above a letter indicating a long vowel sound, such as the long "a," "e," "i," "o" and "u" sounds in "game," "sheep," "hive," "moat" and "truth," respectively.

In Word, click "Insert," click the "Symbol" drop-down box in the Symbols section and select "More Symbols" to open the Symbol box. On the Symbols tab, click the Font drop-down arrow and select "(normal text)," then click the Subset drop-down arrow and select "Latin Extended-A." Scroll down slowly through the Symbol gallery until you find the long vowel symbol you're looking for. When you find it, click the symbol to highlight it and click "Insert" to add it to your document. When you're done adding symbols, click the "Close" button. If you use these symbols often, note that they will appear in the Recently Used Symbols area of the Symbol box when you open it again.

If you think you might need to insert a long vowel sound or other symbol fairly often, you can use Word's Auto-Correct feature to create a keyboard shortcut. For example, you can create a shortcut so every time you type "u" followed by a tilde ("~"), Word will automatically insert the symbol for the long "u." To do this, locate the symbol in Word as described above, and with the Symbol box still open click the "AutoCorrect" button, type the keyboard shortcut in the Replace field in the AutoCorrect box and click "OK."