Ø

This article is about the Scandinavian letter. For other uses, see Ø (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Slashed zero, Empty set, Ef (Cyrillic), or Phi.
Ø in Helvetica and Bodoni

Ø (or minuscule: ø) is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sami languages. It is mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels, such as [ø] and [œ], except for Southern Sami where it is used as an [oe] diphthong.

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"[1] 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 digraph “oe”.

ø (lower case) is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent a close-mid front rounded vowel.

Language usage

Title page of the Christian III Bible, employing the spelling "Københaffn".

Sound value in British English

Both the Danish and the Norwegian "Ø"-vowel pronounciation, is existing whitin British English. "Ø" is pronounced as for instance

The same applies also to the German and Swedish "Ö"-letter.

Similar letters

Similar symbols

History

There are at least two theories about the origin of the letter ø:

Computers

Danish keyboard with keys for Æ, Ø, and Å. On Norwegian keyboards the Æ and Ø switch places.
Character Ø ø
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 216 U+00D8 248 U+00F8
UTF-8 195 152 C3 98 195 184 C3 B8
Numeric character reference Ø Ø ø ø
Named character reference Ø ø
EBCDIC family 128 80 112 70
ISO 8859-1/4/9/10/13/16 216 D8 248 F8
TeX \O \o

Encoding

In Unicode:

Not to be confused with the mathematical signs:

Usage in brands and popular culture

The symbol Ø is used stylistically in place of the letter O in many contexts. Some brands, like Monster Energy, use some altered version of a "slashed O" as part of their graphic, although they typically do not change the actual spelling or pronunciation. In music, it is used by artists such as twenty one pilots and Meghan Trainor in their logos and on tour posters.[5][6] Underoath based their album art for both Ø (Disambiguation) and the Rebirth Tour Double Vinyl on the symbol and customarily stylizes their band name by featuring the character in place of the "o."[7] Nick Jonas also uses a reverse of the symbol in his logo.[8] The symbol is also used by Danish singer .

See also

Notes

  1. Pullum, Geoffrey K., & William A. Ladusaw. 1996. Phonetic Symbol Guide, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 136.
  2. Faqs.org.
  3. Den Store Danske. "Ø, ø".
  4. Barbara Beeton; Asmus Freytag; Laurențiu Iancu; Murray Sargent III (30 October 2015). "Proposal to Represent the Slashed Zero Variant of Empty Set" (PDF). The Unicode Consortium. p. 6.
  5. "Twenty One Pilots Official Website Music, Videos, Photos, Lyrics, Tour Dates, Forums". Twenty One Pilots. Retrieved 2016-06-10.
  6. "Meghan Trainor: The Untouchable Tour Upcoming Shows". Live Nation. Retrieved 2016-06-10.
  7. "Underoath Rebirth Tour 2017". UNDERØATH. Retrieved 13 October 2016.
  8. "Nick Jonas". nickjonas.com. Retrieved 2016-06-10.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 12/1/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.