Ö
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| Ö | ö |
"Ö", or "ö", is a glyph that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, the letter O with umlaut, or a letter O with diaeresis.
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[edit] Letter Ö
The letter Ö occurs in the Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Azeri, Turkish and Crimean Tatar alphabets, where it represents the vowel sound [ø], and in Swedish, Turkish and Icelandic alphabets, in Swedish representing [øː] (e.g. "öl"), [œ] (e.g. "kött") or [ɶ] (e.g. "dörr"). Its name in Finnish, Estonian and Swedish is Ö [øː], not "O with two dots", since it's not a modification of O and denotes a distinctly separate phoneme. It is the last letter in the Finnish and Swedish alphabets, after Z, Å and Ä, thus fulfilling the place of "omega". The usual Finnish expression aasta ööhön and the Swedish one från A till Ö (both meaning "from A to Ö") are the equivalents of the English expression "from A to Z" or "from alpha to omega".
It is collated as an independent letter, usually by placing it at the end of the alphabet. Note that unlike the O-umlaut (see below), the letter Ö cannot be written as "oe". Minimal pairs exist between 'ö' and 'oe' (and also with 'oo', 'öö' and 'öe'). Consider Finnish eläinkö "animal?" (interrogative) vs. eläinkoe "animal test", or dialectal Finnish töissä "at work", toissa "before last --".
Since the Danish, Faroese and Norwegian letter Ø usually represents the same phoneme as in Swedish and Icelandic, these letters are collated equivalently in the languages employing the letter Ö.
In Swedish, ö is a separate word by itself, meaning island. In Estonian Öö means night.
[edit] O-umlaut
The same glyph, O with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of o, resulting in [œ] or [ø]. The letter is collated together with O. The letter also occurs in some languages which have adopted German names or spellings, but is not a part of these languages' alphabets.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, O-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "oe".
[edit] O-diaeresis
O with diaeresis occurs in several languages which use diaereses. In these languages the letter represents a normal O, and the pronunciation does not change. Historically some writers have used it in English words such as zoölogy and coöperate.
[edit] Typography
Historically O-diaeresis was written as an O with two dots above the letter. O-umlaut was written as an O with a small e written above: this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in early modern handwritings. In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots. The origin of the letter Ö was a similar ligature for the digraph "OE": e was written above o and degenerated into two small dots.
In modern typography there was insufficient space on typewriters and later computer keyboards to allow for both an O-with-dots (also representing Ö) and an O-with-bars. Since they looked near-identical the two glyphs were combined, which was also done in computer character encodings such as ISO 8859-1. As a result there was no way to differentiate between the different characters. While Unicode theoretically provides a solution, this is almost never used.
The HTML entity for Ö is Ö. For ö, it is ö (Mnemonic for "O umlaut").
The Unicode code point for ö is U+00F6. Ö is U+00D6.
The numerical XML entity for Ö is Ö or Ö. For ö, it is ö or ö.
| The Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
| history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • ISO 646 • list of letters | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
