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

• In macOS, hold the option key while pressing o (or O).
• 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".
• 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.

• In Unicode, ø is U+00F8 and Ø is U+00D8.
• In HTML, named character reference (numeric character reference):
  • ø (ø)
  • Ø (Ø)
• In ISO 8859-1, the letter ø is hex number F8.
• It is not in the ASCII seven-bit character set.
• It is not in the big5 code table. A possible workaround might be to use a Greek letter encoded in big5 (range 0xA344 to 0xA373).

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).