In modern British English, the spellings generally keep the o but remove the ligature (e.g. Modern American English spelling usually substitutes e, so diarrhœa has become diarrhea, although there are some exceptions, such as phoenix. For example: tegnœura (bat).Ī number of words written with œ were borrowed from French and from Latin into English, where the œ is now rarely written. In Lombard 'œ' represents in many writing systems, sometimes along with 'u', the /øː/ phoneme. The exception to this rule is when a morpheme ending in o is joined to one beginning in e, as in électroencéphalogramme, or with the prefix co-, which is always pronounced /ko/ in hiatus with the following vowel, as in coefficient ('ratio', 'coefficient'). If the oe is not to be pronounced thus, then a diaeresis, acute or grave accent needs to be added in order to indicate that the vowels should be pronounced separately. poêle is itself an etymological spelling, with the ê reflecting its derivation from Latin patella. The most common words of this type are poêle ('stove', 'frying pan') and moelleux ('soft'). When oe occurs in French without the ligature, it is pronounced /wa/, just like words spelt with oi. In all cases, œ is alphabetized as oe, rather than as a separate letter.

Examples include Schœneck ( Moselle), Kœtzingue ( Haut-Rhin), and Hœrdt ( Bas-Rhin). In French placenames of German origin (mostly in and around Alsace-Lorraine, historically Germanic-speaking areas that have changed hands between France and Germany (or Prussia before 1871) a number of times), œ replaces German ö and is pronounced. In some words, like phénix and économique, the etymological œ is changed to a more French é. In such cases, the œ is classically pronounced, or, sometimes, in modern pronunciation. It is most prominent in the words mœurs ('mores'), cœur ('heart'), sœur ('sister'), œuf ('egg'), bœuf ('beef', 'steer'), œuvre ('work') and œil ('eye'), in which the digraph œu, like eu, represents the sound (in other cases, like plurals œufs ('eggs') and bœufs ('steers'), it stands for ).įrench also uses œ in direct borrowings from Latin and Greek. In French, œ is called e dans l'o, which means e in the o (a mnemotechnic pun used first at school, sounding like (des) œufs dans l'eau, meaning eggs in water) or sometimes o et e collés, (literally o and e glued) and is a true linguistic ligature, not just a typographic one (like the fi or fl ligatures), reflecting etymology. It occurs most often in borrowings from Greek, rendering that language's οι (in majuscule ΟΙ), although it is also used in some native words such as coepi 'I began'. The classical diphthong had the value, similar to (standard) English oi as in ch oice. Its traditional name in English is ethel or œthel (also spelt, ēðel, odal).Ĭlassical Latin wrote the o and e separately (as has today again become the general practice), but the ligature was used by medieval and early modern writings, in part because the diphthongal sound had, by Late Latin, merged into the sound. In English runology, œ ɶ is used to transliterate the Runic letter odal (Old English ēðel 'estate, ancestral home'). It is used in the modern orthography for Old West Norse and is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the open-mid front rounded vowel.

In French, the words that were borrowed from Latin and contained the Latin diphthong written as œ now generally have é or è but œ is still used in some non-learned French words, representing mid-front rounded vowel-sounds, such as œil ('eye') and sœur ('sister'). These usages continue in English and French.

In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used in borrowings from Greek that originally contained the diphthong οι, and in a few non-Greek words. Œ ( minuscule: œ) is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e. The word onomatopoeia with the œ ligature For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

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