In phonetics, gemination or consonant elongation happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Gemination is distinct from stress and may appear independently of it. Gemination literally means "twinning", and is from the same Latin root as "Gemini".
Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Arabic, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Classical Hebrew, Hungarian, Catalan, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Russian and Slovak. Most languages (including English) do not have distinctive long consonants. Vowel length is distinctive in more languages than consonant length, although several languages feature both independently (as in Finnish and Estonian), or have interdependent vowel and consonant length (as in Norwegian and Swedish).