Ø or is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese and Southern Sami
languages. It is mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels, such as [ø]
and [œ], except for Southern Sami where it is used as an [oe] diphthong.
The name of this letter is the same as the sound it represents. Though not its native
name, among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed o" or
"o with stroke". Although these names suggest it is a ligature or a diacritical variant
of the letter o, it is considered a separate letter in Norwegian and Danish, and it is
alphabetized after "z"—thus z, æ, ø, and å.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet, or in limited
character sets such as ASCII, ø is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "oe".
Language usage
In modern Danish, Faroese, and Norwegian, the letter is a monophthongal close-mid front
rounded vowel, the IPA symbol for which is also [ø]. As with so many vowels, it has
slight variations of "light" quality is pronounced as [ø], like the "eu" in the French word
bleu) and "dark" quality is pronounced as [œ], like the "œu" in the French word bœuf).
Listen to a Danish speaker reciting the Danish alphabet. In the Suðuroy-dialect of Faroese,
the short ø is pronounced [ʏ], e.g. børn [bʏdn]. The letter was used in both Antiqua
and Fraktur from at least as early as the Christian III Bible. Under German influence,
the letter ö appeared in older texts and was preferred for use on maps until 1957.
The Southern Sami language uses the letter ø in Norway. It is used in the diphthongs
yø [yo] and øø [oe]. In Sweden, the letter ö is preferred.
Ø is used in the orthographies of several languages of Africa, such as Lendu, spoken
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Koonzime, spoken in Cameroon.
In Danish, ø is also a word, meaning "island". The same word is spelled ö in Swedish and
øy in Norwegian. Ǿ may be used in Danish to distinguish its
usage from a similar word with Ø. Example: hunden gǿr, "the dog barks" against hunden
gør, "the dog does". In Danish, hunden gør, "the dog barks", may sometimes be replaced
by the non-authorised spelling hunden gøer. These idiosyncratic spellings are, however,
not officially sanctioned. On Danish keyboards and typewriters, the acute accent may be typed
above any vowel, by pressing the acute key before pressing the letter, but Ǿ is not
implemented in the Microsoft Windows keyboard layout for Danish.
Ø is used in Old Icelandic texts, when written with the standardized orthography, denoting,
among other things the umlauts o > ø and ǫ > ø.
Similar letters The Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Tatar,
Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, Rotuman, German, Estonian, and Hungarian alphabets use the
letter Ö instead of Ø. Hungarian uses Ő for the same sound lengthened.
Ø/ø is not related to, and should not be confused with, the similar-looking Greek Φ/φ
or the Cyrillic Ф/ф. The Cyrillic script has Ө as the equivalent
letter, which is used in the Cyrillic alphabets for Kazakh, Mongolian, Azerbaijani, etc.
The letter Ø-with-umlaut was used by the Øresund bridge company, as part of their
logotype, to symbolize its union between Sweden and Denmark. Since Ø-with-umlaut did not
exist in computer fonts, it was not used in text. The logotype now uses the spelling Øresundsbron,
with Øresunds- being Danish and -bron being Swedish. The letter Ø-with-umlaut sometimes
appears on packaging meant for the Scandinavian market. For example liquorice brand Snøre/Snöre's
logo on the packaging is Snø̈re. Similar symbols
The letter "Ø" is sometimes used in mathematics as a replacement for the symbol "∅", referring
to the empty set as established by Bourbaki. The "∅" symbol is always drawn as a slashed
circle, whereas in most typefaces the letter "Ø" is a slashed ellipse.
The diameter symbol is similar to the lowercase letter ø, and in some typefaces it even uses
the same glyph, although in many others the glyphs are subtly distinguishable. The diameter
symbol is used extensively in engineering drawings, and it is also seen anywhere that
abbreviating "diameter" is useful, such as on camera lenses. For example, a lens with
a diameter of 82 mm would be labeled ⌀ 82 mm. Slashed zero is an alternate glyph for the
zero character. Its slash does not extend outside the ellipse. It is often used to distinguish
"zero" from the Latin script letter "O" anywhere that people wish to preempt confounding of
the two, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications, computer
programming, and telecommunications. The letter "Ø" is often used in trapped key
interlock sequence drawings to denote a key trapped in a lock. A lock without a key is
shown as an "O". The letter "Ø" is also used in written music,
especially Jazz, to type an ad‐hoc chord symbol for a half‐diminished chord, as in
"Cø". The typographically correct chord symbol is spelled with the root name, followed by
a slashed degree symbol, as in "C𝆩". The slashed degree symbol is found in the musical
symbols block of Unicode but is unsupported by some fonts. 𝆩 can always be included
with handwriting, however. History
There are at least two theories about the origin of the letter ø:
It possibly arose as a version of the ligature, Œ, of the digraph "oe", with the horizontal
line of the "e" written across the "o". That it arose in Anglo-Saxon England as an
O and an I written in the same place, to represent a long close sound resulting from i-mutation
of : compare Bede's Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon period spelling Coinualch for standard Cēnwealh.
Later the letter ø disappeared from Anglo-Saxon as the Anglo-Saxon sound changed to , but
by then use of the letter ø had spread from England to Scandinavia.
Computers
In OS X, it can be typed by holding O, or o, and then typing 6. In OS X and earlier
systems, using a US English-language keyboard, the letter can be typed by holding the [Option]
key while typing O, or o, to yield Ø, or ø.
On an Amiga operating system using any keyboard map, the letter can be typed by holding the
[Alt] key while typing O, or o, to yield Ø, or ø.
On Microsoft Windows, using the "United States-International" keyboard setting, it can be typed by holding
down the Alt-Gr key and pressing "L". It can also be typed under any keyboard setting by
holding down the Alt key while typing 0216 or 0248 on the numeric keypad, provided the
system uses code page 1252 as system default. Using Microsoft Word, ø and Ø may be typed
by pressing Ctrl-/ followed by either minuscule or majuscule O.
In the X Window System environment, one can produce these characters by pressing Alt-Gr
and o or O, or by pressing the Multi key followed with a slash and then o or O.
In some systems, such as older versions of MS-DOS, the letter Ø is not part of the widely
used code page 437. In Scandinavian codepages, Ø replaces the yen sign at 165, and ø replaces
the ¢ sign at 162. In Unicode, Ǿ and ǿ have the code points
U+01FE and U+01FF. They are not available in the Microsoft Windows keyboard layout for
Danish. Encoding
In Unicode: U+00D8 Ø latin capital letter o with stroke
U+00F8 ø latin small letter o with stroke Not to be confused with the mathematical signs:
U+2205 ∅ empty set U+2300 ⌀ diameter sign
See also Å
Æ Ä
Œ Ö
Slashed zero Notes
References Robert Bringhurst. The Elements of Typographic
Style, pp. 270, 284. For typographic reference to "slashed o".