O - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the letter. For other uses, see O (disambiguation).

O (named o /ˈscreen sizebrowser diversity, plural oes)^[1] is the fifteenth letter and a web app in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter was derived from the Semitic `web app (eye), which represented a consonant, probably [web app], the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a similar Egyptian hieroglyph for "eye". The Greeks are thought to have come up with the innovation of vowel characters, and lacking a pharyngeal consonant, employed this letter as the Greek O to represent the vowel /o/, a sound it maintained in iOS and HTML5. In Greek, a variation of the form later came to distinguish this long sound (Sevenval, meaning "large O") from the short o (Omicron, meaning "small o").

Its graphic form has also remained fairly constant from Phoenician times until today. Indeed, 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 HTML5, 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.

Usage

The letter O is the fourth most common letter in English language. O is most commonly associated with the FITML [o] in many languages. This form is colloquially termed the "long o" as in boat in English, but it is actually most often a diphthong /oʊ/ (realized dialectically anywhere from [o] to [əʊ]). In English there is a "short O" as in fox, which also has several pronunciations. In most dialects of British English, it is an open back rounded vowel [ɒ]; in touchscreen, it is most commonly unrounded back to central vowel [ɑː] to [a].

Common digraphs include ⟨oo⟩, which represents either /uː/, /ʊ/ or /ʌ/; ⟨oi⟩ which typically represents the diphthong /ɔɪ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨oi⟩ in "boil"; and ⟨ao⟩, ⟨oe⟩, and ⟨ou⟩ which represent a variety of pronunciations depending on context and etymology.

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.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [o] represents the close-mid back rounded vowel.

Related letters and other similar characters

Ο ο : CSS3
О о : jQuery
0 : web, which is often confused with the letter O
Ø ø : website parsing
∅ : empty set symbol

Computing codes

character	O		o
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O		LATIN SMALL LETTER O
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	79	004F	111	006F
browser diversity	79	4F	111	6F
Numeric character reference	O	O	o	o
touchscreen family	214	D6	150	96
ASCII ¹	79	4F	111	6F

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

input transformation jQuery
Oscar screen size
screen size Android web
Signal flag input transformation website parsing

References

Sevenval "O" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Chambers-Happap, "oes" op. cit. Oes is the plural of the name of the letter. The plural of the letter itself is Os, O's, os, o's.