öcharacter

The ö character, or o with diaeresis, is a Latin-script letter used in several languages to denote a distinct vowel sound. The exact pronunciation varies by language, but it often represents a front rounded vowel, commonly transcribed as [ø].

In German, ö is a fully integrated letter of the alphabet and contrasts with other vowels (as in schön or Köln). In Finnish and Swedish, ö is a standard vowel with its own phoneme. In Turkish and Hungarian, ö is also part of the standard alphabet and represents a front rounded vowel as well. In each language, ök- sequences or diacritics are used consistently to signal a particular vowel quality.

Encoding and rendering: ö is encoded in Unicode as U+00F6 (lowercase) and U+00D6 (uppercase). In HTML, the entities are ö for ö and Ö for Ö. In UTF-8, ö is encoded as two bytes (C3 B6) and Ö as (C3 96). The character is part of the Latin-1 and Unicode character sets, so it can appear in most modern fonts and systems, though it is not part of standard ASCII.

Orthography and usage: In languages where it is a full alphabetic letter, ö functions as a distinct vowel with phonemic status. In English and many other languages, ö appears primarily in loanwords and proper names, where it may be preserved (e.g., Döner, Örebro) or approximated by "oe" or simply omitted in casual writing.

See also: diacritic marks, umlaut, and other language-specific vowels that use diacritics to indicate altered pronunciation.