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Letter of the Latin alphabet used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ø (or minuscule: ø) is a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages. It is mostly used to represent the mid front rounded vowels, such as [ø] ⓘ and [œ] ⓘ, except for Southern Sámi where it is used as an [oe] diphthong.
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The name of this letter is the same as the sound it represents (see usage). Among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed O"[1] or "o with stroke". Although these names suggest it is a ligature or a diacritical variant of the letter ⟨o⟩, it is considered a separate letter in Danish and Norwegian, and it is alphabetized after ⟨z⟩ — thus ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, ⟨æ⟩, ⟨ø⟩, and ⟨å⟩.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet, or in limited character sets such as ASCII, ⟨ø⟩ may correctly be replaced with the digraph ⟨oe⟩, although in practice it is often replaced with just ⟨o⟩, e.g. in email addresses. It is equivalent to ⟨ö⟩ used in Swedish (and a number of other languages), and may also be replaced with ⟨ö⟩, as was often the case with older typewriters in Denmark and Norway, and in national extensions of International Morse Code.
⟨ø⟩ (minuscule) is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent a close-mid front rounded vowel.
The letter arose as a version of the ligature ⟨oe⟩. In Danish manuscripts from the 12th and 13th century, the letter used to represent an /ø/ sound is most frequently written as an ⟨o⟩ with a line through, but also ⟨oe⟩. The line could both be horizontal or vertical. [8]
Some 7-bit ASCII variants defined by ISO/IEC 646 use 0x5C for Ø and 0x7C for ø, replacing the backslash and vertical bar. The most common locations in EBCDIC code pages is 0x80 and 0x70. Most code pages used by MS-DOS such as CP437 did not contain this character; in Scandinavian codepages, Ø replaces the yen sign (¥) at 165, and ø replaces the ¢ sign at 162. The 8-bit ISO-8859-1 and similar sets used 0xD0 and 0xF0; these locations were then inherited by CP1252 on Windows, and by Unicode.
Not to be confused with the mathematical signs:
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