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"Ö", or "ö", is a glyph which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, the letter O with umlaut, or a letter O with diaeresis.
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Letter Ö
The letter Ö occurs in the Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Sámi, and Turkish alphabets, where it represents the vowel sound , and in Swedish and Icelandic alphabets, representing (e.g. "kött") or (e.g. "dörr").
It is collated as an independent letter, usually by placing it at the end of the alphabet. Note that unlike the O-umlaut (see below), the letter Ö can not be written as "oe". Minimal pairs exist between 'ö' and 'oe'.
O-umlaut
A similar glyph, O with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of o, resulting in . The letter is collated together with O. The letter also occurs in some languages which have adopted German names or spellings, but is not a part of these languages' alphabets.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, O-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "oe".
O-diaeresis
O with diaeresis occurs in several languages which use diaereses. In these languages the letter represents a normal O, and the pronunciation does not change.
Typography
Historically O-diaeresis was written as an O with two dots above the letter. O-umlaut was written as an O with a small e written above: this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in early modern handwritings. In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots. The origin of the letter Ö was a similar ligature for the digraph "OE": e was written above o and degenerated into two small dots.
In modern typography there was insufficient space on typewriters and later computer keyboards to allow for both an O-with-dots (also representing Ö) and an O-with-bars. Since they looked near-identical the two glyphs were combined, which was also done in computer character encodings such as ISO 8859-1. As a result there was no way to differentiate between the different characters. While Unicode theoretically provides a solution, this is almost never used.
The HTML entity for Ö is Ö. For ö, it is ö (Mnemonic for "O umlaut").
| Latin alphabet: | Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Qq | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz |
|---|---|
| Modified characters: |
Àà | Áá | Ââ | Ää | Åå | Āā | Ąą | Çç | Ĉĉ | Čč | Ćć | Đđ | Ęę | Ëë | Ĝĝ | Ğğ | Ĥĥ | Įį | Ïï | İı | Ĵĵ | Łł | Ññ | Õõ | Öö | Őő | Øø | Ǫǫ | Şş | Șș | Šš | Ŝŝ | Țț | Ŭŭ | Üü | Ųų | Ůů | Űű | Žž |
| Alphabet extensions: | Ææ | Ðð | DZdz | DŽdž | Əə | Ȝȝ | Ƕƕ | ĸ | LJlj | LLll | NJnj | Ŋŋ | Œœ | Ȣȣ | [[Half r|]] | ſ | ß | Þþ | Ƿƿ | IJij |