Open O
Letter of the Latin alphabet
Open o or turned c (majuscule: Ɔ, minuscule: ɔ) is a letter of the extended Latin alphabet. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it represents the open-mid back rounded vowel. It is used in the orthographies of many African languages using the African reference alphabet.
The Yucatec Maya language used Ɔ to transcribe the alveolar ejective affricate [t͡sʼ] consonant in the orthography of the Colonial period. Now dz or tsʼ is preferred.
01Unicode
| Preview | Ɔ | ɔ | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER OPEN O | LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 390 | U+0186 | 596 | U+0254 |
| UTF-8 | 198 134 | C6 86 | 201 148 | C9 94 |
| Numeric character reference | Ɔ | Ɔ | ɔ | ɔ |
On the macOS US Extended keyboard, ɔ and Ɔ can be typed with ⌥ Option+: followed by c or C.
02Related characters
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
- Ɔ with diacritics: ɔ́ ɔ̀ ɔ̃ ᶗ
- Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to Ɔ:
- U+1D10 ᴐ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL OPEN O
- U+1D12 ᴒ LATIN SMALL LETTER SIDEWAYS OPEN O
- U+1D53 ᵓ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL OPEN O
Similar looking letters
Open o looks like a reversed letter 'C'. Claudius introduced a Ɔ (the antisigma) with the intention of replacing bs and ps.
The Scandinavian explanatory symbol (forklaringstegnet) can be typeset using the open o followed by a colon, thus: ɔ:. It is used to mean "namely", "id est", "scilicet" or similar.
This letter is often used to refer to the Copyleft official sign, which looks like an open o with a circle around it.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Open O”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Latin letter open O.svg by Person or Persons Unknown, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Claudian letters.svg by Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain
- Ivar Aasen. (1873) Norsk ordbog med dansk forklaring. Christiania - p.175.png by en:Ivar Aasen, Public domain
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