Oe (Cyrillic)

Oe or Barred O (Ө ө; italics: Ө ө) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

Shape

Its form was copied from the Latin letter Barred O (Ɵ ɵ) used in Jaŋalif and other alphabets. Despite having a similar shape, it is genetically related neither to the Greek letter Theta (Θ θ/ϑ) nor to the archaic Cyrillic letter Fita (Ѳ ѳ). However, traditional forms of Cyrillic Oe and Fita (since the 18th century) are identical, and designers of Unicode's sample font were probably the first ones who split glyphs of the two letters (providing Oe with a horizontal bar and Fita with a tilde inside). In traditional typography, shape of the inner line depends on typeface, not on meaning of the letter: both Oe and Fita may contain the line straight or waving.

Usage

Oe is used in the alphabets of the Bashkir, Buryat, Kalmyk, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Mongolian and Yakut languages, where it represents the open-mid front rounded vowel /œ/. In Kazakh, this letter may also express /wʉ/. International Phonetic Alphabet uses it to represent the close-mid central rounded vowel, and often also the mid central rounded vowel.

Oe is most commonly romanized as ⟨Ö⟩; but its ISO 9 transliteration is ⟨ô⟩.

Computing codes

Character	Ө		ө
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BARRED O		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER BARRED O
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	1256	U+04E8	1257	U+04E9
UTF-8	211 168	D3 A8	211 169	D3 A9
Numeric character reference	Ө	Ө	ө	ө

See also

• О о : Cyrillic letter O
• Ӧ ӧ : Cyrillic letter O with diaeresis
• Ӫ ӫ : Cyrillic letter Oe with diaeresis