Oe (Cyrillic)


Oe or barred O is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

Shape

Its form was copied from the Latin letter barred O used in Jaꞑalif and other alphabets. Despite having a similar shape, it is related neither to the Greek letter theta nor to the archaic Cyrillic letter fita. However, traditional forms of Cyrillic fita and oe are identical, and designers of Unicode's sample font were probably the first ones who split glyphs of the two letters. In traditional typography, the shape of the inner line depends on typeface, not on meaning of the letter: the bar in both oe and fita may either be straight or wavy.

Usage

Oe is used in the alphabets of the Bashkir, Buryat, Kalmyk, Kazakh, Khanty, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Tuvan, Mongolian, and Yakut languages. It commonly represents the front rounded vowels and, except in Mongolian where it represents or. In Kazakh, this letter may also express. Recently, the letter has also been adopted in the spelling of the Komi-Yazva language, where it represents a close-mid centralized back unrounded or weakly rounded vowel. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses the identically shaped Latin counterpart, ɵ, to represent the close-mid central rounded vowel, and sometimes also the mid central rounded vowel.
Oe is most commonly romanized as ; but its ISO 9 transliteration is.
In Tuvan, Kyrgyz and Mongolian the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.

Computing codes