O

O (named o /ˈoʊ/, plural oes)^[1] is the fifteent letter an a vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

O Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

Cursive script 'o' and capital 'O' in the U.S. D'Nealian script style

History

Its graphic fairm haes an aa remained fairly constant frae Phoenician times till the day. The name o the Phoenician letter wis ʿeyn, meanin "eye", an indeed its shape oreeginates simply as a drawin o a human ee (possibly inspired bi the correspondin Egyptian hieroglyph, c.f. Proto-Sinaitic script). Its oreeginal soond value wis that o a consonant, probably [ʕ], the soond representit bi the cognate Arabic letter letter ع ʿayn.

The uise o this Phoenician letter for a vowel soond is due tae the early Greek alphabets, which adoptit the letter as O "omicron" tae represent the vowel /o/. The letter wis adoptit wi this value in the Auld Italic alphabets, includin the early Latin alphabet. In Greek, a variation o the fairm later came tae distinguish this lang soond (Omega, meanin "large O") frae the short o (Omicron, meanin "smaa o"). Greek omicron gae rise tae the correspondin Cyrillic letter O an the early Italic letter tae runic runic ᛟ.

Even alphabets constructit "frae scratch", i.e. nae derived frae Semitic, uisually hae seemilar fairms tae represent this soond, e.g.; the creators o the Afaka an Ol Chiki scripts, each inventit in different pairts o the warld in the last century, baith attributit thair vowels for 'O' tae the shape o the mooth when makin this soond.

Uisage

The letter O is the fowert maist common letter in the Inglis leid. O is maist commonly associatit wi the Open-mid back roondit vowel [ɔ], Mid back roondit vowel [o̞] or close-mid back roondit vowel [o] in mony leids. This fairm is colloquially termed the "lang o" as in boat in Inglis, but it is actually maist eften a diphthong /oʊ/ (realized dialectically onywhaur frae [o] tae [əʊ]). In Inglis thare is a "short O" as in fox, which an aa haes several pronunciations. In maist dialects o Breetish Inglis, it is aither an open-mid back roondit vowel [ɔ] or an open back roondit vowel [ɒ]; in American Inglis, it is maist commonly an unroondit back tae a central vowel [ɑː] tae [a].

Common digraphs include 'oo', which represents aither /uː/, /ʊ/ or /ʌ/; 'oi' which teepically represents the diphthong /ɔɪ/, lik the pronunciation o 'oi' in "boil"; an 'ao', 'oe', an 'ou' which represent a variety o pronunciations dependin on context an etymology.

Ither leids uise O for various values, uisually back vowels which are at least pairtly open. Derived letters sic as Ö an Ø hae been creatit for the alphabets o some leids tae distinguish values that wur nae present in Latin an Greek, parteecularly roondit front vowels.

In the Internaitional Phonetic Alphabet, [o] represents the close-mid back roondit vowel.

Relatit letters an ither similar characters

• Ο ο : Greek letter Omicron
• О о : Cyrillic letter O
• Օ օ : Armenie letter O
• 0 : deegit zero, which is eften confused wi the letter O
• Ø ø : Latin letter Ø
• ∅ : empty set seembol
• ⌀ : diameter seembol
• ° : degree seembol
• º : masculine ordinal indicator (in Galician, Italian, Portuguese, an Spainyie)

Computin codes

Character	O		o
Unicode name	LATIN CAIPITAL LETTER O		LATIN SMAA LETTER O
Encodins	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	79	U+004F	111	U+006F
UTF-8	79	4F	111	6F
Numeric chairacter reference	O	O	o	o
EBCDIC faimily	214	D6	150	96
ASCII 1	79	4F	111	6F

¹ An aa for encodins based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodins.

Ither representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Oscar	–––

		[[File:Sign language {{{fingerspelling}}}.svg|90px]]
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