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The "'Ø'" (minuscule: "'ø'"), is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese and Norwegian alphabets. The vowel is not to be confused with the slashed zero.

Contents

Usage

In languages

History

On computers

Mathematics

Music

Other uses

Footnotes

References

See also

Usage

★ In modern Danish, Faroese, and Norwegian, the letter is a monophthongal close-mid front rounded vowel, the IPA symbol for which is also . To non-rhotic English speakers, the vowel it sounds most like is the vowel in "bird" or "hurt".^[1]

★
★ However, in the Suðuroy-dialect of Faroese short ø is pronounced , e.g. børn (''children'').

★ The name of this letter is the same as the sound it represents. Speakers of languages which use the ø letter hold that ø is not a ligature or a variant of the letter "O". Though not its native name, among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed o".

In languages

★ The Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Tatar, Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, German, Estonian, and Hungarian alphabets use the letter "Ö" instead of 'Ø'.

★ In Danish (and ''Riksmål'' Norwegian) spelling, ''ø'' is also a word and means "island".

★ Ø is a place in Denmark.

★ The symbol "ø" is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to indicate the sound of the Danish and Norwegian letter, the close-mid front rounded vowel.

★ Although it never appears elsewhere, the letter Ø-with-umlaut is used by the Danish and Swedish national railways in pictograms marking trains crossing the Øresund (da)/Öresund (sv) Bridge between the nations.

★ The 'ø' is used in the fictional language Bork Bork Bork.

★ There are examples in typesetting of ø being confused with the Greek φ.

★ The Cyrillic alphabet has "Ө" as the equivalent letter, which are used in the Cyrillic alphabets for Kazakh, Mongolian, Azerbaijani etc.

★ In linguistics, the symbol is used to refer to the linguistic zero.

History

There are two theories about the origin of the letter ø :-

★ That it arose as a version of the ligature Œ for a diphthong spelled "oe", with the horizontal line of the "e" written across the "o".

★ That it arose in Anglo-Saxon England as an O and an I written in the same place, to represent a long close [ö] sound resulting from i-mutation of [ō]: compare Bede's Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon period spelling ''Coinualch'' for standard ''Cēnwealh'' (a man's name) (in a text in Latin). Later the letter ø disappeared from Anglo-Saxon as the Anglo-Saxon sound [ø] changed to [ē], but by then use of the letter ø had spread from England to Scandinavia.

On computers

★ For computers, when using the ISO 8859-1 or Unicode sets, the codes for 'Ø' and 'ø' are respectively 216 and 248, or in hexadecimal D8 and F8.

★ In the TeX typesetting system, the letter is produced by o

★ On the Apple Macintosh operating system it can by typed by pressing the [Option] key then typing O or o, while using U.S. keyboard.

★ On Microsoft Windows, using the "United States-International" keyboard setting, it can be typed by holding down the [Alt] key and pressing "L". It can also be typed under any keyboard setting by holding down the [Alt] key while typing 0216 or 0248 on the numeric keypad, provided the system uses code page 1252 as system default.

★ The Unicode letter name is "Latin capital/small letter O with stroke".

★ In HTML character entity references, needed in cases where the letter is not available by ordinary coding, the codes are Ø and ø.

★ In the X Window System environment, one can produce these characters by pressing Alt-Gr and o or O, or by pressing the Multi key followed with a slash and then o or O.

★ In some systems, such as older versions of MS-DOS, the letter Ø is not part of the default codepage. In Scandinavian codepages, Ø replaces the yen sign (¥) at 165, and ø replaces the ¢ sign at 162.

Mathematics

★ The symbol "Ø" is also used in mathematics to refer to the empty set, following Bourbaki.

Music

★ ØØ Void is an album by the Seattle-based drone doom metal band Sunn O))).

★ "Ø" is the name of a Finnish experimental Intelligent Dance Music artist, also known as Mika Vainio.

★ American post hardcore band Underøath uses the ø on some writings of their name, and as a logo to represent themselves.

★ Bløf is a Dutch pop band.

Other uses

★ In engineering drawings, the symbol ⌀ (closely resembling Ø) preceding a dimension indicates a diameter.

★ In electrical and electronic engineering, the symbol Φ (closely resembling Ø) is called "phase" and designates a phase of alternating current. E.g. - AΦ, BΦ, and CΦ in three phase power or signal circuitry.

★ In photography, the symbol ⌀ (closely resembling Ø) represents the lens diameter, i.e. a lens with a diameter of 82mm would be written on the lens as: ø 82mm

★ As an abbreviation for Enhedslisten, a Danish political party

★ The letter ∅ with two brackets symbolizing a double no set was used as the gang symbol for the Lords of Chaos, a self-styled teen militia. Ex. '( Ø )'

★ Also for Underoath Ø.

★ In Indonesian car number plates, the symbol ∅ (closely resembling Ø) is placed behind number of registration to distinguish it from number 0. For example: B 2031 ∅T, which is registered in Jakarta.

Footnotes

1. Faqs.org. Danish and Norwegian alphabet contains a recording of a person reciting the Danish alphabet.

References

★ Robert Bringhurst (2002). The Elements of Typographic Style, pp. 270, 284. For typographic reference to "slashed o".

See also

★ Å

★ Æ

★ Œ

★ Slashed zero