O (Cyrillic)
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 with a dot inside (Ꙩ/ꙩ), used in certain manuscripts in spelling of word око 'eye' and its derivatives;
- "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/.
Related letters and other similar characters
- 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
Preview | О | о | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER O | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER O | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 1054 | U+041E | 1086 | U+043E |
UTF-8 | 208 158 | D0 9E | 208 190 | D0 BE |
Numeric character reference | О |
О |
о |
о |
Named character reference | О | о | ||
KOI8-R and KOI8-U | 239 | EF | 207 | CF |
Code page 855 | 215 | D7 | 214 | D6 |
Windows-1251 | 206 | CE | 238 | EE |
ISO-8859-5 | 190 | BE | 222 | DE |
Macintosh Cyrillic | 142 | 8E | 238 | EE |
Exotic glyph variants of Cyrillic O are available only in Unicode:[2]
- broad Ѻ/ѻ:
- CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ROUND OMEGA: U+047A
- CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ROUND OMEGA: U+047B
- narrow O is not represented yet itself, only in digraph Oy/oy:
- CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER UK: U+0478 (deprecated in favor of combination of Cyrillic letters О and у, U+041E U+0443)
- CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER UK: U+0479 (deprecated in favor of combination of Cyrillic letters о and у, U+043E U+0443)
- variant with a cross inside is not represented yet
- eyed Ꙩ/ꙩ:
- CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER MONOCULAR O: U+A668
- CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER MONOCULAR O: U+A669
- two-eyed (Ꙫ/ꙫ, Ꙭ/ꙭ):
- CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BINOCULAR O: U+A66A
- CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER BINOCULAR O: U+A66B
- CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE MONOCULAR O: U+A66C
- CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER DOUBLE MONOCULAR O: U+A66D
- variant "double O without dots" is not represented yet
- many-eyed ꙮ:
- CYRILLIC LETTER MULTIOCULAR O: U+A66E
- combining O for Church Slavonic abbreviations (as трⷪца = троица '(Holy) Trinity'):
- COMBINING CYRILLIC LETTER O: 2DEA
References
- ^ Карский, Ефим (1979). Славянская кирилловская палеография. Moscow.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ "Cyrillic: Range: 0400–04FF" (PDF). The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0. 2010. p. 40. Retrieved 2011-10-05.