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

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

The HTML entity is &Otilde; for Õ and &otilde; for õ.


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.


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.


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 / and /.


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

Skolt Sami[edit]

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

Mathematical use[edit]

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

Computer encoding[edit]

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
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 &#213; &#xD5; &#245; &#xF5;
Named character reference &Otilde; &otilde;
EBCDIC family 239 EF 207 CF
ISO 8859-1/4/9/10/13/14/15/16 213 D5 245 F5


See also[edit]