Open o is a letter of the extended Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

. In the International Phonetic Alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...

, it represents the open-mid back rounded vowel. It is used in the orthographies of many African languages

African languages

There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...

 using the African reference alphabet

African reference alphabet

An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982...

.

Unicode

In Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

, the majuscule  is encoded in the Latin Extended-B block at U+0186 and the minuscule  is encoded at U+0254.

In some Windows programs, the lower case  can be typed by pressing Alt + 596 and the capital , by pressing Alt + 390.

Similar letters

The letter looks like a reversed C. Claudius

Claudius

Claudius , was Roman Emperor from 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, he was the son of Drusus and Antonia Minor. He was born at Lugdunum in Gaul and was the first Roman Emperor to be born outside Italy...

 introduced

Claudian letters

The Claudian letters were developed by, and named after, the Roman Emperor Claudius . He introduced three new letters:*a reversed C to replace BS and PS, much like X stood in for CS and GS...

 a reversed C (the antisigma) with the intention of replacing bs and ps.

The Yucatec Maya language used a reversed C as a consonant in the orthography of the Colonial period. Now dz

Voiced alveolar affricate

The voiced alveolar affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The sound is transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet with ⟨⟩ or ⟨⟩ , and the equivalent X-SAMPA representation is ⟨dz⟩.-Features:...

 or tz is preferred.

See also

• Open E
  Open E
  Open E, Open-E or open e may refer to:* Open E tuning for guitars* Open-E , a software development company* Latin epsilon, a letter of the extended Latin alphabet...
  
  
• Writing systems of Africa (section on Latin script)