O Etymology, Origin & Meaning

In English, the name of the letter is the “long O” sound, pronounced /ˈoʊ/. Quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words. Reduplicated form oh-oh as an expression of alarm or dismay is attested from 1944 (as uh-oh by 1935). But it is not found in Old English (which had ea and betjili translated Latin oh with la or eala) or the older Germanic languages except those that probably borrowed it from Greek or Latin. Interjection expressing various emotions (fear, surprise, pain, invocation, gladness, admiration, etc.), 1530s, from Middle English o, from Old French ô, oh or directly from Latin o, oh; a common Indo-European interjection (compare Greek ō; Old Church Slavonic and Lithuanian o; Irish och, Old Irish a; Sanskrit a). In Middle English and later colloquial use, o or o’ can be an abbreviation of on or of, and is still literary in some words (o’clock, Jack-o’-lantern, tam-o’-shanter, cat-o’-nine-tails, will-o’-the-wisp, etc.).

• In words such as word, work, and world, the sound has been affected by the preceding bilabial.
• O (+ dative, triggers lenition, combined with the singular definite article on)
• Descendant of; used to form Irish patronymic surnames.
• The short sound is the descendant of Middle English short o in which both the closed and open short o, which were distinguished in Old English, met.
• O f (unstressed accusative form of ea)

Portuguese

The form of the letter on the Moabite Stone was small o, and this small form appears in early Greek inscriptions from Thera and Corinth. The Greeks in adapting the Semitic alphabet to their own use used this letter (omicron) to express the vowel o, as the letters ʾaleph, he, cheth, and yod were used to express vowels. In Greek, a variation of the form later came to differentiate this long sound (omega, meaning “large O”) from the short o (Omicron, meaning “small o”). The “connective” -o- is the usual connecting vowel in compounds taken or formed from Greek, where it often is the vowel in the stem. (Thus there is no grounds for the belief that the form of the letter represents the shape of the mouth in pronouncing it.) The Greeks later added a special character for “long” O (omega), and the original became “little o” (omicron).

Lower Sorbian

Borrowed from Spanish o (“or”), from Latin aut. Reduced form of go (“to go”). See the Silesian language article on Wikipedia for more, and o for development of the glyph itself. The Silesian orthography is based on the Latin alphabet.

Used with indefinite forms only. The letter Õ in Portuguese is nasalized, meaning the sound passes through both the mouth and nose. In Portuguese, it can indicate both stress and an open vowel sound, as in avó (grandmother).

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. The use of this Phoenician letter for a vowel sound is due to the early Greek alphabets, which adopted the letter “omicron” to represent the vowel /o/. O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. The Greeks also lacked the sound, so when they adopted the Phoenician letters they arbitrarily changed O’s value to a vowel. The fifteenth letter of the English alphabet, called o and written in the Latin script.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. The Greek omicron gave rise to the corresponding Cyrillic letter O. Its graphic form has remained fairly constant from Phoenician times until today.

O f (unstressed accusative form of ea) For the most part, usage of the definite article in Portuguese is the same as in English. See the history of Polish orthography article on Wikipedia for more, and o for development of the glyph itself. The Polish orthography is based on the Latin alphabet.