O
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Page protected with pending changes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "O" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For the number zero, see 0. For other uses, see O (disambiguation).
For technical reasons, ":O" redirects here. For the keyboard symbol, see List of emoticons.
O
O o
(See below)
Writing cursive forms of O
Usage
Writing system Latin script
Type Alphabetic
Language of origin Latin language
Phonetic usage [o]
[o̞]
[ɔ]
/oʊ/
[uː]
[ʌ]
[ɒ]
[ø]
[a]
[ʕ]
[w]
[◌ʷ]
[ʊ]
Unicode codepoint U+004F, U+006F
Alphabetical position 15
History
Development
D4
Proto-sinaitic ʿayin
Protoayin.svg
Phoenician Ayin
Ο ο
𐌏
O o
Time period ~-700 to present
Descendants • Ö
• ⱺ
• Ø
• Œ
• Ɔ
• Ơ
• Ỏ
• Ꝋ
• ∅
• º
• ℅
Sisters ᴥ
Ƹ
ʿ
О
Ю
Ө
ע
ع
ܥ
ࠏ
ዐ
ࡘ
ჺ
Ո ո
Օ օ
ᱳ
ᱜ
ᱣ
Variations (See below)
Other
Other letters commonly used with o(x)
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
O
ISO basic
Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
vte
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is o (pronounced /ˈoʊ/), plural oes.[1]
History
Late Renaissance or early Baroque design of an O, from 1627
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 (possibly inspired by the corresponding Egyptian hieroglyph, cf. Proto-Sinaitic script). Its original sound value was that of a consonant, probably [ʕ], the sound represented by the cognate Arabic letter ع ʿayn.[citation needed]
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 /o/. The letter was adopted with this value in the Old Italic alpha
Caption this Meme
