Ø

Ø / ø 🔊 (Ø / LETTER O WITH STROKE) is a vowel (bwym) and a letter (jixbuo) used in the Danish, Norwegian languages.

MLT Usage

In Modern Literal Taiwanese, this letter is used for the sound written in TMSS as an o with a backslash. For example, hør (good), øar (oyster), ørgiøo (jelly fig), and Ørciw (Australia) are all written with ø. In many cases, the compound vowel øe may be substituted with "oe".

Computer Input

• ø (Unicode U+00F8, HTML: ø, or ø) and Ø (U+00D8, Ø Ø)
• In MS Word and EmEditor, the ø can be typed with the following keystroke: ^/o (Ctrl+Slash+o). This means hold Ctrl press Slash, release, then press o.
• In Mozilla Firefox with the abcTajpu plugin, one can input this by typing o, /, then Insert.
• On Microsoft Windows
  • Alt-0248: hold Alt and press 0248 on the keypad
  • using the "United States-International" keyboard setting, it can be typed by holding down the "Alt-Gr" (right Alt) key and pressing "L".
• It can be input on Mac by holding the "Option" key while pressing o (or O).

One disadvantage to using ø is that it is not included in the ASCII seven-bit character set. However, it is in the ISO 8859-1 eight-bit character set as hex number F8. In Unicode it is also F8 but in UTF-8, it is encoded as hex C3B8.

Ø is also not within the big5 code table. However, the Greek letters are encoded in big5 (range 0xA344 to 0xA373); a Greek letter could be used instead.

History in Written Taiwanese

Taiwanese Modern Spelling System originally prescribed two special characters: the Greek letter Ν (nu) and an o crossed by a backslash. In Modern Literal Taiwanese, ø came into use.

In some cases it is convenient to use Q in place of ø. Usually the Q is made smaller font size. However, "html small" formatting makes the word incompatible with FireDictionary.

Other uses

Ø, Denmark is a piece of land in the valley of the Nørreå in the eastern part of Jutland, Denmark. Its name means "island" (Danish: ø; Taigie: tøfsu).