1. The doubling or repetition of a consonant sound or letter in a word, especially at a syllable boundary.
Usage: linguistics; phonology
2. The process or result of doubling or pairing; the state of being doubled.
Usage: formal; rare

Examples

• In Italian, gemination of consonants changes the meaning of words, as in 'pena' (penalty) versus 'penna' (pen).
• The gemination of the 't' in 'butter' is pronounced differently in American English than in British English.
• Linguists study gemination to understand how languages modify sound patterns.
• The word 'misspell' shows gemination of the 's' sound at the morpheme boundary.
• In Japanese, gemination is marked by a small tsu character in the writing system.