U00D6

U+00D6, commonly referred to as the Latin capital letter O with diaeresis, is a distinct letter used in several languages. The character Ö consists of the Latin capital letter O with two dots above it. In Unicode it is officially named LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS and has the code point U+00D6.

In the Latin-1 Supplement block, U+00D6 has the byte value 0xD6. In UTF-8 it encodes as 0xC3 0x96. The character can be represented in HTML as Ö or as the numeric character reference Ö, facilitating its use in web content and various data formats.

Ö is used in a number of languages, including German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Turkish, Hungarian, and Estonian, among others. In many of these languages it represents a front rounded vowel, commonly transcribed as [ø]. In German, Ö is treated as a separate letter with its own position in the alphabet rather than merely as a variant of O. The letter often appears in loanwords and proper names in other languages as well.

The diacritic above the letter is called a diaeresis in some contexts and is often referred to as an umlaut in German usage. Historically, the diacritic marks a phonetic distinction from plain O, signaling a change in pronunciation or a separate vowel. The character's origins lie in the practice of modifying a base letter with diacritics to indicate a distinct sound.

Rendering of Ö depends on font support and encoding. It is widely supported in modern fonts and systems, and correct rendering requires proper Unicode handling and character set configuration to avoid misrepresentation as a similar-looking character.