о

O (О о; italics: О о) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

O commonly represents the close-mid back rounded vowel /o/, like the pronunciation of ⟨o⟩ in Scottish English "go".

History

The Cyrillic letter O was derived from the Greek letter Omicron (Ο ο).

The name of O in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was онъ (onŭ), meaning "he" or "it".

In the Cyrillic numeral system, O had a value of 70.

Form

Modern fonts

In modern-style typefaces, the Cyrillic letter O looks exactly like the Latin letter O ⟨O o⟩ and the Greek letter Omicron ⟨Ο ο⟩.

Church Slavonic printed fonts and Slavonic manuscripts

Historical typefaces (like poluustav (semi-uncial), a standard font style for the Church Slavonic typography) and old manuscripts represent several additional glyph variants of Cyrillic O, both for decorative and orthographic (sometimes also "hieroglyphic"[1]) purposes, namely:

broad variant (Ѻ/ѻ), used mostly as a word initial letter (see Broad On for more details);
narrow variant, being used now in Synodal Church Slavonic editions as the first element of digraph Oy/oy (see Uk (Cyrillic) for more details), and in the editions of Old Believers for unstressed "o" as well;
variant with a cross inside, used in certain manuscripts as the initial letter of words окрестъ 'around, nearby' (the root of this Slavonic word, крест, means 'cross') and округъ 'district, neighbourhood' with their derivatives;
"eyed" variant (Monocular O) with a dot inside (Ꙩ/ꙩ), used in certain manuscripts in spelling of word око 'eye' and its derivatives. In many other texts, including the birchbark letters, the monocular O was not used as a hieroglyph but largely as a synonym of Broad On signalling the word-initial position;
"two-eyed" variants with two dots inside (Ꙫ/ꙫ or Ꙭ/ꙭ), also double "O" without dots inside were used in certain manuscripts in spelling of dual/plural forms of the words with the same root 'eye';
"many-eyed" variant (ꙮ), used in certain manuscripts in spelling of the same root when embedded into word многоочитый 'many-eyed' (an attribute of seraphs).

Usage

In Russian, O is used word-initially, after another vowel, and after non-palatalized consonants. Because of a vowel reduction processes, the Russian /o/ phoneme may have a number of pronunciations in unstressed syllables, including [ɐ] and [ə].

In Macedonian the letter represents the sound /ɔ/.

In Tuvan the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.[2][3]

Ο ο : Greek letter Omicron
O o : Latin letter O
Ё ё : Cyrillic letter Yo
Ѻ ѻ : Cyrillic letter Broad On
Ӧ ӧ : Cyrillic letter O with diaeresis
Ө ө : Cyrillic letter Oe
Ӫ ӫ : Cyrillic letter Oe with diaeresis
Ҩ ҩ : Cyrillic letter O-hook

Computing codes

Exotic glyph variants of Cyrillic O are available only in Unicode:[4][5][6][7][8]

broad Ѻ/ѻ:
narrow ᲂ is not noly represent itself, but also used in digraph Oy/oy:
with a cross inside (Ꚛ/ꚛ):
doubled Ꚙ/ꚙ:
eyed Ꙩ/ꙩ:
two-eyed (Ꙫ/ꙫ, Ꙭ/ꙭ):
many-eyed ꙮ:
combining O for Church Slavonic abbreviations (as трⷪца = троица '(Holy) Trinity'):

References

External links

The dictionary definition of О at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of о at Wiktionary