Multiocular O

archaic Cyrillic letter From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Multiocular O
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Multiocular O () is a unique kind of cyrillic O. It is like Monocular O multiplied seven or ten times[a]. This type of O is only found in one book from the 15th century, in the Old Church Slavonic phrase серафими многоꙮчитїи (abbreviated мн̑оꙮ҆читїи̑; serafimi mnogoočitii, 'many-eyed seraphim').[1][2] The phrase is in a copy of the Book of Psalms from around 1429,[1][2] now found in the collection of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.[3]

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Unicode history

People proposed adding it to Unicode in 2007.[4] Unicode added it as character U+A66E in Unicode version 5.1 (2008).[5] The original version had only seven eye and sat on the baseline. However, in 2021, someone tweeted that the version was wrong,[6] it came to linguist Michael Everson's attention that the character in the 1429 manuscript was actually made up of ten eyes. In 2022 people proposed to change it, and unicode updated ot om Unicode 15.0 to have ten eyes and to extend below the baseline.[7][8] However, not all fonts support the ten-eyed variant as of August 2025.

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Overview

The o was mistranscribed into Unicode and most fonts do not represent the number of circles correctly

The letter in the original manuscript.
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Multiocular O
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The incorrect form originally implemented into Unicode (2007–2022).

Notelist

  1. Originally 10 times, but most fonts have only 7 eyes

References

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