U00D5

U+00D5, Latin Capital Letter O with Tilde, is a character in the Unicode standard and part of the Latin-1 Supplement block. It is used in several Latin-script alphabets, most notably as a distinct letter in Estonian, where Õ represents a specific vowel sound and participates in standard spelling and collation. The corresponding lowercase form is U+00F5 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE (õ).

Unicode name and related characters

The official Unicode name for the uppercase form is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH TILDE. Its lowercase counterpart is LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE. The character is closely related to O with diaeresis (Ö, U+00D6) but is a separate letter in languages that use tilde diacritics as part of their orthography.

Encoding and representations

In UTF-8, U+00D5 is encoded as the two-byte sequence 0xC3 0x95. In HTML, the character can be represented by the named entity Õ for uppercase and õ for lowercase. In plain text, they appear as Õ and õ. In Unicode normalization, the precomposed character can decompose to the base letter O followed by the combining tilde U+0303.

Usage notes

Õ is most commonly associated with Estonian, where it is treated as a distinct letter rather than a diacritic on O. It may appear in transliteration or loanwords in other languages that use the Latin script. In discussions of typography and character encoding, it is important to distinguish Õ from Ö (O with diaeresis).