Ø
Ø — minuscule: "ø", is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Southern Sami languages. It is mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels, such as ø œ, except for Southern Sami where it's used as an [oe] diphtong.
The name of this letter is the same as the sound it represents (see usage). Though not its native name, among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed o" or "o with stroke". Although these names suggest it is a ligature or a diacritical variant of the letter o, it is considered a separate letter in Norwegian and Danish, and it is alphabetized after "z" -- thus z, æ, ø, and å.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, ø is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "oe".
Language usage
- In modern Danish, Faroese, and Norwegian, the letter is a monophthongal close-mid front rounded vowel, the IPA symbol for which is also [ø]. To non-rhotic English speakers, the vowel it most closely resembles aurally is the vowel in "bird" or "hurt". As with so many vowels, it has slight variations of "light" quality (in Danish, søster ("sister") is pronounced as eu in French bleu) and "dark" quality (in Danish, bønne ("bean") is pronounced as the "ir" in the English word bird).[1] The Danish and Norwegian alphabets contain a recording of a person reciting the Danish alphabet. In the Suðuroy-dialect of Faroese, the short ø is pronounced [ʏ], e.g. børn [bʏdn] (children).
- The Southern Sami language uses the letter ø in Norway. It is used in the diphthongs yø [yo] and øø [oe]. In Sweden, the letter ö is preferred.
- Ǿ (Ø with an accent) may be used in Danish to distinguish its usage from a similar word with Ø. Example: "hunden gǿr" (Danish), "the dog barks" against "hunden gør (det)", "the dog does (it)". However, this only takes place in handwriting since Ǿ is not available in the Norwegian or Danish Windows keyboard layout. In Danish, "hunden gør", "the dog barks", may rather be replaced by the non-authorised spelling "hunden gøer" to distinguish it from "hunden gør (det)", "the dog does (it)". These idiosyncratic spellings are, however, not officially sanctioned. On Danish and Norwegian manual typewriters, ´ ("acute") may be typed above any letter.
- Ø is used in the orthographies of several African languages, such as Lendu, spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Koonzime, spoken in Cameroon.
- In Danish spelling, ø is also a word and means "island". The same word is spelled ö in Swedish and øy in Norwegian.
Similar letters
- The Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Tatar, Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, Rotuman, German, Estonian, and Hungarian alphabets use the letter Ö instead of Ø. Hungarian uses Ő for the same sound lengthened.
- Ø/ø is not related to, and should not be confused with, the similar-looking Greek Φ/φ or the Cyrillic Ф/ф.
- The Cyrillic script has Ө as the equivalent letter, which is used in the Cyrillic alphabets for Kazakh, Mongolian, Azerbaijani, etc.
- In linguistics, the capital is used to refer to the linguistic zero.
- The letter Ø-with-umlaut (Ø̈, ø̈) was used by the Øresund bridge company, as part of their logotype, to symbolize its union between Sweden and Denmark. Since it did not exist in computer fonts, it was not used in text. The logotype now uses the spelling Øresundsbron, with Øresunds- being Danish and -bron being Swedish. The letter Ø-with-umlaut sometimes appears on packaging meant for the Scandinavian market. For example liquorice brand Snøre/Snöre's logo on the packaging is Snø̈re.
History
There are at least two theories about the origin of the letter ø:
- It possibly arose as a version of the ligature, Œ, of the digraph "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 /ø/ sound resulting from i-mutation of /o/: 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 /e/, but by then use of the letter ø had spread from England to Scandinavia.
Computers
- In Unicode the letters have the respective code points U+00D8 Ø latin capital letter o with stroke (HTML:
Ø Ø) and U+00F8 ø latin small letter o with stroke (HTML: ø ø). The code points are the same as in the older standard ISO 8859-1.
- In the TeX/LaTeX typesetting system, the letter is produced by \o, and the diameter symbol by \diameter.
- On a Mac operating system using a US English-language keyboard, the letter can be typed by holding the [Option] key while typing O, or o, to yield Ø, or ø.
- On an Amiga operating system using any keyboard map, the letter can be typed by holding the [Alt] key while typing O, or o, to yield Ø, or ø.
- On Microsoft Windows, using the "United States-International" keyboard setting, it can be typed by holding down the Alt-Gr key and pressing "L". It can also be typed under any keyboard setting by holding down the <kbd class="keyboard-key" style="border: 1px solid; border-color: #ddd #bbb #bbb #ddd; border-bottom-width: 2px; -moz-border-radius: 3px; -webkit-border-radius: 3px; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #f9f9f9; padding: 1px 3px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.85em; white-space: nowrap;">Alt</kbd> key while typing 0216 (for uppercase) or 0248 (for lowercase) on the numeric keypad, provided the system uses code page 1252 as system default. (Code page 1252 is a superset of ISO 8859-1, and 216 and 248 are the decimal equivalents of hexadecimal D8 and F8.)
- Using Microsoft Word, ø and Ø may be typed by pressing Ctrl-/ followed by either minuscule or majuscule O.
- 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 widely used code page 437. In Scandinavian codepages, Ø replaces the yen sign (¥) at 165, and ø replaces the ¢ sign at 162.
- In Unicode, Ǿ and ǿ have the code points U+01FE and U+01FF. They are not available in the Microsoft Windows keyboard layout for Danish.
Encoding
In Unicode:
- U+00D8 Ø latin capital letter o with stroke (HTML:
Ø Ø)
- U+00F8 ø latin small letter o with stroke (HTML:
ø ø)
Not to be confused with the mathematical sign:
- U+2205 ∅ empty set (HTML:
∅ ∅)
- U+2300 ⌀ diameter sign (HTML:
⌀ )
Symbol
- 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.
- In music theory, ø is widely used as a chord label to represent a half-diminished chord. (m7b5: 1 - b3 - b5 - b7). For example, Cm7b5 would be notated as Cø.
- The letter ∅ with two brackets symbolizing a double null set was used as the gang symbol for the Lords of Chaos, a self-styled teen militia. Ex. ( Ø )
- In linguistics, a zero element (i.e. a grammatical element represented by the absence of a word) is represented by ∅, such as the difference in English between the articles "the", "a", "an", and instances where nouns are not preceded by articles, represented by ∅.
- In phpMyAdmin, the ø is used to substitute the "mean" or "average".
- In audio engineering, the ø is used to represent a signal whose polarity (sometimes called phase) has been reversed.
- Many scholars in biological and human sciences use Mø as shorthand notation for "macrophage".
- The American Post-Hardcore band Underoath uses the Ø symbol in their logo and for the cover of the "Ø (Disambiguation)" album. (according to the Metal umlaut tradition).
Similar symbols
- The letter "Ø" is sometimes used in mathematics as a replacement for the symbol "∅" (Unicode character U+2205), referring to the empty set as established by Bourbaki. The "∅" symbol is always drawn as a slashed circle, whereas in most typefaces the letter "Ø" is a slashed ellipse.
- The diameter symbol (⌀) (Unicode character U+2300) is similar to the letter Ø, and in some typefaces it even uses the same glyph, although in many others the glyphs are subtly distinguishable. The diameter symbol is used extensively in engineering drawings, and it is also seen anywhere that abbreviating "diameter" is useful, such as on camera lenses. For example, a lens with a diameter of 82 mm would be labeled ⌀ 82 mm.
- Slashed zero is an alternate glyph for the zero character. Its slash does not extend outside the ellipse (except in hasty handwriting). It is often used to distinguish "zero" ("0") from the Latin script letter "O" anywhere that people wish to preempt confounding of the two, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications, computer programming (such as software development), and telecommunications.
See also
Notes
References