O (Cyrillic)


О is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
The letter most commonly represents the sound /ɔ/, like the pronunciation of in "aura". In Russian and Serbo-Croatian, it represents the sound /o/.

History

[Image:JIUKEN typewriter.JPG|thumb|Some old Russian typewriters like this one were manufactured without the digit 0 as the letter O could be used instead.]
The Cyrillic letter О was derived from the Greek letter Omicron.

Form

Modern fonts

In modern-style typefaces, the Cyrillic letter O looks exactly like the Latin letter O and the Greek letter Omicron.

Church Slavonic printed fonts and Slavonic manuscripts

Historical typefaces and old manuscripts represent several additional glyph variants of Cyrillic O, both for decorative and orthographic purposes, namely:
  • broad variant, used mostly as a word initial letter ;
  • narrow variant, ᲂ, being used now in Synodal Church Slavonic editions as the first element of digraph Oy/oy, and in the editions of Old Believers for unstressed "o" as well;
  • variant with a cross inside, Ꚛ, used in certain manuscripts as the initial letter of words окрестъ 'around, nearby' and округъ 'district, neighbourhood' with their derivatives;
  • "eyed" variant with a dot inside, 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, 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'.

Usage

In Russian, O is used word-initially, after another vowel, and after non-palatalized consonants. Because of a vowel reduction processes, the Russian phoneme may have a number of pronunciations in unstressed syllables, including and. It is the most common letter in the Russian language.
In Macedonian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Belarusian, the letter represents the sound /ɔ/.
In Tuvan the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

Exotic glyph variants of Cyrillic O are available only in Unicode:
  • broad Ѻ/ѻ:
  • * CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ROUND OMEGA: U+047A
  • * CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ROUND OMEGA: U+047B
  • narrow ᲂ does not just represent itself, but also used in digraph Oy/oy:
  • * CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER NARROW O: U+1C82
  • * CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER UK: U+0478
  • * CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER UK: U+0479
  • with a cross inside :
  • * CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER CROSSED O: U+A69A
  • * CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER CROSSED O: U+A69B
  • doubled Ꚙ/ꚙ:
  • * CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE O: U+A698
  • * CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER DOUBLE O: U+A699
  • eyed Ꙩ/ꙩ:
  • * CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER MONOCULAR O: U+A668
  • * CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER MONOCULAR O: U+A669
  • two-eyed :
  • * 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
  • many-eyed ꙮ:
  • * CYRILLIC LETTER MULTIOCULAR O: U+A66E
  • combining O for Church Slavonic abbreviations :
  • * COMBINING CYRILLIC LETTER O: 2DEA