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Ö

ö

"'Ö'", or "'ö'", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter 'O' with umlaut or diaeresis.

Contents

Letter Ö

O-umlaut

O-diaeresis

Typography

Mathematics

See also

External links

Letter Ö

The letter 'Ö' occurs in the Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Azeri, Turkish and Crimean Tatar alphabets, where it represents the vowel sound ; and in the Swedish, Turkish and Icelandic alphabets, in Swedish representing (e.g. "öl"), (e.g. "kött") or (e.g. "dörr"). Its name in Finnish, Estonian, Icelandic and Swedish is Ö [øː], not "O with two dots", since /ö/ is not considered a "variant" of the phoneme /o/, but a distinct phoneme.
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 Finnish ''töissä'' "at work", ''toissa'' "before last --, second/penultimate --" (cf. Germanic umlaut). In the case the character Ö is unavailable, O is substituted and context is relied upon for inference of the intended meaning.
It is collated as an independent letter, usually by placing it at the end of the alphabet. It is the last letter in the Finnish and Swedish alphabets, after Z, Å and Ä, thus fulfilling the place of "omega". It is also last in the Icelandic alphabet, after Y, Þ and Æ. The usual Finnish expression ''aasta ööhön'', Icelandic one ''frá A til Ö'' and the Swedish one ''från A till Ö'' (all meaning "from A to Ö") are the equivalents of the English expression "from A to Z" or "from alpha to omega".
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''.

O-umlaut

The same glyph, 'O' with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of ''o'', resulting in or . 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".

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 (e.g. in the Dutch word ''coöperatief'' [cooperative]). Historically some writers have used it in English words such as ''zoölogy'' and ''coöperate'', and it is also commonly employed in the name of the constellation ''Boötes''.

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'.

Mathematics

In mathematics, 'Ö' is sometimes used to represent Square root.

See also

★ Umlaut (diacritic)

★ O with diaeresis (Cyrillic)

External links

★ The Nordic graphemes FAQ

★ The IstroRomanians in Croatia: Alphabet

★ The Local - Sweden to phase out Å, Ä and Ö (April Fool's joke)