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For the similarly named Danish island, see Ø, Denmark.

Øø
Øø










The "Ø" (minuscule: "ø"), is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faeroese and Norwegian languages. The vowel is not to be confused with the slashed zero.

Usage

  • The name of this letter is the same as the sound it represents. Speakers of languages which use the letter ø hold that it is not a ligature or a diacritical variant of the letter o (That is, emically they perceive it as a different letter entirely). Though not its native name, among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed o" or "o with stroke".

In languages

History

There are two theories about the origin of the letter ø :-

  • That it arose as a version of the ligature Œ for a diphthong spelled "oe", with the horizontal line of the "e" written across the "o".
  • That it arose in Anglo-Saxon England as an O and an I written in the same place, to represent a long close [ö] sound resulting from i-mutation of [ō]: compare Bede's Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon period spelling Coinualch for standard Cēnwealh (a man's name) (in a text in Latin). Later the letter ø disappeared from Anglo-Saxon as the Anglo-Saxon sound [ø] changed to [ē], but by then use of the letter ø had spread from England to Scandinavia.

On computers

Danish keyboard with keys for Æ, Ø and Å.
On Norwegian keyboards the Æ and Ø trade places.
  • For computers, when using the ISO 8859-1 or Unicode sets, the codes for 'Ø' and 'ø' are respectively 216 and 248, or in hexadecimal D8 and F8.
  • In the TeX typesetting system, the letter is produced by \o
  • On the Apple Macintosh operating system it can by typed by pressing the [Option] key then typing O or o, while using U.S. keyboard.
  • On Microsoft Windows, using the "United States-International" keyboard setting, it can be typed by holding down the [Alt-Gr] key and pressing "L". It can also be typed under any keyboard setting by holding down the [Alt] key while typing 0216 or 0248 on the numeric keypad, provided the system uses code page 1252 as system default.
  • The Unicode letter name is "Latin capital/small letter O with stroke".
  • In HTML character entity references, needed in cases where the letter is not available by ordinary coding, the codes are Ø and ø.
  • In the X Window System environment, one can produce these characters by pressing Alt-Gr and o or O, or by pressing the Multi key followed with a slash and then o or O.
  • In some systems, such as older versions of MS-DOS, the letter Ø is not part of the default codepage. In Scandinavian codepages, Ø replaces the yen sign (¥) at 165, and ø replaces the ¢ sign at 162.

Mathematics

  • The letter "Ø" is sometimes used in mathematics as a replacement for the symbol "∅" (Unicode character U+2205), referring to the empty set as established by Bourbaki. The "∅" symbol is always drawn as a slashed circle, whereas in most typefaces the letter "Ø" is a slashed ellipse. Virtually identical is the diameter sign (Unicode character U+2300).

Music

Other uses

The fallen Astivus is marked as dead in the Gladiator Mosaic.
  • In engineering drawings, the symbol ⌀ (closely resembling Ø) preceding a dimension indicates a diameter.
  • In electrical and electronic engineering, the symbol Φ (Greek letter Phi) , which closely resembles Ø, is called "phase" and designates a phase of alternating current. E.g. - AΦ, BΦ, and CΦ in three phase power or signal circuitry.
  • In photography, the symbol ⌀ (closely resembling Ø) represents the lens diameter, i.e. a lens with a diameter of 82mm would be written on the lens as: ø 82mm
  • As an abbreviation for Enhedslisten, a Danish political party
  • The letter ∅ with two brackets symbolizing a double no set was used as the gang symbol for the Lords of Chaos, a self-styled teen militia. Ex. ( Ø )
  • In Indonesian car number plates, the symbol ∅ (closely resembling Ø) is placed behind number of registration to distinguish it from number 0. For example: B 2031 ∅T, which is registered in Jakarta.
  • The ø is used as the o in "The Wørd", a regular segment on The Colbert Report.
  • A similar symbol was used to mark the name of a gladiator who died in combat in Roman mosaics representing fights.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Faqs.org. Danish and Norwegian alphabet contains a recording of a person reciting the Danish alphabet.

References

See also