O is the fifteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet, a vowel. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈoʊ/) is spelled o; the plural is oes, though usage of this is rare.
The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin (eye), which represented a consonant, probably the voiced pharyngeal fricative (IPA:[ʕ]), the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a similar Egyptian hieroglyph for "eye".
Its graphic form has also remained fairly constant from Phoenician times until today. Indeed, even alphabets constructed "from scratch", i.e. not derived from Semitic, usually have similar forms to represent this sound—for example the creators of the Afaka and Ol Chiki scripts, each invented in different parts of the world in the last century, both attributed their vowels for 'O' to the shape of the mouth when making this sound.
O is most commonly associated with the close-mid back rounded vowel [o] in many languages. This form is colloquially termed the "long o" in English, but it is actually most often a diphthong /oʊ/ (realized dialectically anywhere from [o] to [əʊ]).
O is used at some times to mean Zero(0), which is a number. It is not wrong to use it as a number in phone numbers, room numbers, etc.
Other languages use O for various values, usually back vowels which are at least partly open. Derived letters such as Ö and Ø have been created for the alphabets of some languages to distinguish values that were not present in Latin and Greek, particularly rounded front vowels.
In Unicode, the capital O is codepoint U+004F and the lowercase o is U+006F.
The EBCDIC code for capital O is 214 and for lowercase o is 150.
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646
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