Õ

Not to be confused with Ő, O with double acute.

"Õ", or "õ" is a composition of the Latin letter O with the diacritic mark tilde.

The HTML entity is Õ for Õ and õ for õ.

Estonian

In Estonian, Õ is the 27th letter of the alphabet (between W and Ä), representing the close-mid back unrounded vowel sound [ɤ]. The vowel had previously been marked with Ö, but in the early 19th century, Otto Wilhelm Masing adopted the letter Õ, ending the confusion between several homographs and clearly showing how to pronounce a word.

In informal writing, e.g., emails, instant messaging and when using foreign keyboard layouts where the letter Õ is not available, some Estonians use the characters O or 6 to approximate this letter.

In most dialects of the islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, Õ is pronounced the same as Ö.

Portuguese

In the Portuguese language, the symbol Õ stands for a nasal close-mid back rounded vowel, also written [õ] in IPA. It is not considered an independent letter of the alphabet.

Vietnamese

In the Vietnamese language, the symbol Õ stands for the sound [ɔ] with creaky voice (rising tone with a glottal break followed by a continuation of the rising tone). Vietnamese also has derived letters Ỗ/ỗ and Ỡ/ỡ.

Võro

In the Võro language, this letter is the 25th letter of the alphabet, pronounced as in Estonian.^[1]

Skolt Sami

In the Skolt Sami language, this letter is the 25th letter of the alphabet, pronounced quite like in Estonian and Võro.

Mathematical use

The symbol, pronounced soft-O, is used as a variant of big O notation that ignores logarithmic factors. Thus, $f(n)\in\tilde{O}(g(n))$ is shorthand for $\exists k:f(n) \in O(g(n) \log^kg(n))$ .

Computer encoding

Due to character encoding confusion, the letters can be seen on many incorrectly coded Hungarian web pages, representing Ő/ő (letter O with double acute accent). This can happen due to said characters sharing a code point in the ISO 8859-1 and 8859-2 character sets, as well as the Windows-1252 and Windows-1250 character sets, and the web site designer forgetting to set the correct code page. Õ is not part of the Hungarian alphabet. The usage of Unicode avoids this type of problems.

Character	Õ		õ
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH TILDE		LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	213	U+00D5	245	U+00F5
UTF-8	195 149	C3 95	195 181	C3 B5
Numeric character reference	Õ	Õ	õ	õ
Named character reference	Õ		õ
EBCDIC family	239	EF	207	CF
ISO 8859-1/4/9/10/13/14/15/16	213	D5	245	F5

References

↑ Omniglot

Õ