O is the 15th letter and the second-to-last vowel in the modern
English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
History Its graphic form has remained fairly
constant from Phoenician times until today. The name of the Phoenician letter
was ʿeyn, meaning "eye", and indeed its shape originates simply as a drawing of
a human eye. Its original sound value was that of a consonant, probably [ʕ],
the sound represented by the cognate Arabic letter ع ʿayn.
The use of this Phoenician letter for a vowel sound is due to the early Greek
alphabets, which adopted the letter as O "omicron" to represent the vowel . The
letter was adopted with this value in the Old Italic alphabets, including the
early Latin alphabet. In Greek, a variation of the form later came to
distinguish this long sound from the short o. Greek omicron gave rise to the
corresponding Cyrillic letter O and the early Italic letter to runic ᛟ.
Even alphabets constructed "from scratch", i.e. not derived from Semitic,
usually have similar forms to represent this sound, e.g.; the creators of the
Afaka and Ol Chiki scripts, each invented in different parts of the world
in the last century, both attributed their vowels for 'O' to the shape of the
mouth when making this sound. Use in writing systems
= English = The letter ⟨o⟩ is the fourth most common
letter in the English alphabet. Like the other English vowel letters, it has
associated "long" and "short" pronunciations. The "long" ⟨o⟩ as in
boat is actually most often a diphthong . In English there is also a "short" ⟨o⟩
as in fox, , which sounds slightly different in different dialects. In most
dialects of British English, it is either an open-mid back rounded vowel
[ɔ] or an open back rounded vowel [ɒ]; in American English, it is most commonly
an unrounded back to a central vowel [ɑ] to [a].
Common digraphs include ⟨oo⟩, which represents either or ; ⟨oi⟩ or ⟨oy⟩,
which typically represents the diphthong , and ⟨ao⟩, ⟨oe⟩, and ⟨ou⟩ which
represent a variety of pronunciations depending on context and etymology.
In other contexts, especially before a letter with a minim, ⟨o⟩ may represent
the sound , as in 'son' or 'love'. In English, the letter ⟨o⟩ in isolation
before a noun, usually capitalized, marks the vocative case, as in the
titles to O Canada or O Captain! My Captain! or certain verses of the Bible.
= Other languages = ⟨o⟩ is commonly associated with the
Open-mid back rounded vowel [ɔ], Mid back rounded vowel [o̞] or close-mid
back rounded vowel [o] in many languages. Other languages use ⟨o⟩ for
various values, usually back vowels which are at least partly open. Derived
letters such as ⟨ö⟩ and ⟨ø⟩ have been created for the alphabets of some
languages to distinguish values that were not present in Latin and Greek,
particularly rounded front vowels. = Other systems =
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨o⟩ represents the close-mid back
rounded vowel. Related characters
= Ancestors, descendants and siblings = 𐤏 : Semitic letter Ayin, from which the
following symbols originally derive Ο ο : Greek letter Omicron, from which O
derives О о : Cyrillic letter O, which also
derives from Omicron Օ օ : Armenian letter O
∅ : empty set symbol IPA-specific symbols related to O: ɔ ɔ̃
O with diacritics: Ø ø Ö ö Ó ó Ò ò Ô ô Ǒ ǒ Ő ő Ŏ ŏ Ȯ ȯ Ọ ọ Ɵ ɵ Ơ ơ Ỏ ỏ Ō ō Õ õ Ǫ
ǫ Ȍ ȍ = Ligatures and abbreviations =
Œ œ : Latin OE ligature œ̃ : an IPA vowel
Computing codes 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII,
including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations See also
Oxygen = O O mark
References External links
Media related to O at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of O at
Wiktionary The dictionary definition of o at
Wiktionary