Õ
Encyclopedia
Õ õ


"Õ", or "õ" is a composition of the Latin
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

 letter O
O
O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...

 with the diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

 mark tilde
Tilde
The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....

.

The HTML entity is Õ for Õ and õ for õ.

Estonian

In Estonian
Estonian language
Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

, Õ is the 24th letter of the alphabet
Estonian alphabet
The Estonian alphabet is used for writing the Estonian language and is based on the Latin alphabet, with German influence. As such, the Estonian alphabet has the letters Ä, Ö, and Ü , which represent the vowel sounds , and , respectively...

 (between V
V
V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....

 and Ä
Ä
"Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.- Independent letter :...

), representing the close-mid back unrounded vowel
Close-mid back unrounded vowel
The close-mid back unrounded vowel, or high-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is , called "ram's horns"...

 sound [ɤ]. The vowel had previously been marked with Ö
Ö
"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels or . In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as a "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified .- O-Umlaut...

, but in early 19th century, Otto Wilhelm Masing
Otto Wilhelm Masing
Otto Wilhelm Masing was an early Livonian Estophile and a major advocate of peasant rights, especially regarding education....

 adopted the letter Õ, ending the confusion between several homographs and showing clearly how to pronounce a word.

In informal writing, e.g., emails, instant messaging and when using foreign keyboard layouts where the letter Õ is not available, some Estonians use the characters O
O
O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...

 or 6 to approximate this letter.

Portuguese

In the Portuguese language
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

, the symbol Õ stands for a nasal
Nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the velum so that air escapes both through nose as well as the mouth. By contrast, oral vowels are ordinary vowels without this nasalisation...

 close-mid back rounded vowel, also written [õ] in IPA. It is not considered an independent letter of the alphabet
Portuguese alphabet
The Portuguese alphabet, , consists of the following 23 or 26 Latin letters:In addition, the following characters with diacritics are used: Áá, Ââ, Ãã, Àà, Çç, Éé, Êê, Íí, Óó, Ôô, Õõ, Úú. These are not, however, treated as independent letters in collation, nor do they have entries of their own in...

.

Vietnamese

In the Vietnamese language
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

, the symbol Õ stands for the sound [ɔ] with creaky voice
Creaky voice
In linguistics, creaky voice , is a special kind of phonation in which the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together; as a result, the vocal folds are compressed rather tightly, becoming relatively slack and compact...

 (rising tone with a glottal break followed by a continuation of the rising tone). Vietnamese also has derived letters / and /.

Võro

In the Võro language
Võro language
The Võro language is a language belonging to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages. Traditionally it has been considered a dialect of the South Estonian dialect group of the Estonian language, but nowadays it has its own literary language and is in search of official recognition as an...

, this letter is the 25th letter of the alphabet, pronounced as in Estonian.

Mathematical use

The symbol, pronounced soft-O, is used as a variant of big O notation
Big O notation
In mathematics, big O notation is used to describe the limiting behavior of a function when the argument tends towards a particular value or infinity, usually in terms of simpler functions. It is a member of a larger family of notations that is called Landau notation, Bachmann-Landau notation, or...

 that ignores logarithmic factors. Thus, Õ is shorthand for for some k.

Encoding problems

Due to character encoding
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...

 confusion, the letters can be seen on many incorrectly coded Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

 web pages, representing Ő/ő
O
O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a...

 (letter O with double acute accent
Double acute accent
The double acute accent is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to as Hungarumlaut, a portmanteau of Hungarian umlaut...

). This can happen due to said characters sharing a code point
Code point
In character encoding terminology, a code point or code position is any of the numerical values that make up the code space . For example, ASCII comprises 128 code points in the range 0hex to 7Fhex, Extended ASCII comprises 256 code points in the range 0hex to FFhex, and Unicode comprises 1,114,112...

 in the ISO 8859-1 and 8859-2 character sets, as well as the Windows-1252
Windows-1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...

 and Windows-1250
Windows-1250
Windows-1250 is a code page used under Microsoft Windows to represent texts in Central European and Eastern European languages that use Latin script, such as Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovene, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian , Romanian and Albanian...

 character sets, and the web site designer forgetting to set the correct code page
Code page
Code page is another term for character encoding. It consists of a table of values that describes the character set for a particular language. The term code page originated from IBM's EBCDIC-based mainframe systems, but many vendors use this term including Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle Corporation...

. Õ is not part of the Hungarian alphabet.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK