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"Ö", or "ö", is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut or diaeresis.
O-Umlaut
The letter O with Umlaut appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of o, resulting in [-] 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".
Letter Ö in Scandinavian languages
The letter Ö in the Swedish and Icelandic alphabets historically arises from the Germanic umlaut, but it is considered a separate letter from O. In Swedish, Ö is pronounced [ø-] (e.g. "öl"), [-] (e.g. "kött") or [-] (e.g. "dörr"). Its name in Icelandic and Swedish is Ö [ø-]. It is collated as an independent letter and is placed at the end of the alphabet; in the Swedish alphabet, after Z, Å and Ä; and in the Icelandic alphabet, after Y, Þ and Æ.
The Icelandic expression 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.
Letter Ö in other languages
The letter Ö occurs, apart from Germanic languages, in the Finnish, Karelian, Estonian, Hungarian, Azeri, Turkish and Crimean Tatar alphabets, where it represents the vowel sound [ø]. Its name in Finnish and Estonian is Öö [ø-], not "O with two dots", since /ø/ is not considered a "variant" of the phoneme /o/, but a distinct phoneme.
Note that unlike the O-umlaut, 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" (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 alphabet, after Z, Å and Ä, thus fulfilling the place of "omega", for example in the Finnish expression aasta ööhön "from A to Z".
In Estonian, öö means night.
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[when-] some writers[who-] 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.
In TeX, Ö and ö are produced using \"{O} and \"{o} respectively.
The numerical XML entity for Ö is Ö or Ö. For ö, it is ö or ö.
Hungarian alphabet contains both ö and -: double acute o is the longer pair of ö. See double acute accent.
See also
References
External links
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