Gemination

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In phonetics, gemination is when a spoken consonant is "doubled", so that it is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a "single" consonant. In written language, this is often indicated by writing a consonant twice ("ss", "kk", "pp", etc.). In some languages, such as Italian, Japanese and Finnish, this can actually affect the meaning of words, where the only difference between one word and another is whether a consonant is pronounced singly or doubly (geminated). In English, phonetic gemination is almost entirely absent except for a couple of instances across morphemic boundaries: for instance, unaimed versus unnamed.

Gemination can also be a purely spelling phenomenon, as in English words like "running."

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