Cyrillic O variants

This is a list of rare glyph variants of Cyrillic letter. They were proposed for inclusion into Unicode in 2007 and incorporated as in Unicode 5.1.

Monocular O
Monocular O is one of the rare glyph variants of Cyrillic letter. This glyph variant was used in certain manuscripts in the root word "eye", and also in some other functions, for example, in the word- and syllable-initial position. It is used in some late birchbark letters of the 14th and 15th centuries, where it is usually differentiated from a regular, used after consonants, also by width, being a broad On (ѻ) with a dot inside.

The letter resembles Latin script bilabial click (ʘ) and the Gothic letter hwair.

Binocular O
Binocular O is found in certain manuscripts in the plural or dual forms of the root word eye, like.

A similar jocular glyph (called "double-dot wide O") has been suggested as a phonetic symbol for the "nasal-ingressive velar trill", a paralinguistic impression of a snort, due to the graphic resemblance to a pig snout.

Double monocular O
Double monocular O is one of the exotic glyph variants of the Cyrillic letter O. This glyph variant can be found in certain manuscripts in the plural or dual forms of the word eye, for example "[two] eyes".

Multiocular O
Multiocular O is a rare glyph variant found in a single 15th century manuscript, in the Old Church Slavonic phrase "" (abbreviated "";, "many-eyed seraphim"). It was documented by Yefim Karsky in 1928 in a copy of the Book of Psalms from around 1429, now found in the collection of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.

The character was proposed for inclusion into Unicode in 2007 and incorporated as character U+A66E in Unicode version 5.1 (2008). The representative glyph had seven eyes and sat on the baseline. However, in 2021, following a tweet highlighting the character, it came to linguist Michael Everson's attention that the character in the 1429 manuscript was actually made up of ten eyes. After a 2022 proposal to change the character to reflect this, it was updated later that year for Unicode 15.0 to have ten eyes and to extend below the baseline. However, not all fonts support the ten-eyed variant.

Double O
Double O (Ꚙ ꚙ) is a variant of the letter О in the Cyrillic script. It is found in some early Old Church Slavonic manuscripts, where it is used in place of $⟨О⟩$, such as in двꚙе "two", ꚙбо "both", ꚙбанадесять "twelve", and двꚙюнадесять "twelve". The Cyrillic "double O" resembles to the Latin-script double-o ligature (ꝏ).

Crossed O


Crossed O is a glyph variant of Cyrillic O with the addition of a cross, used in Old Church Slavonic. The crossed O is primarily used in the word ꚛкрест (around, in the region of) in early Slavonic manuscripts, whose component крест means 'cross'.

Broad On


Broad On  (italics:  ) is a positional and orthographical variant of the Cyrillic O. On(ѻнъ, ) is a traditional name of Cyrillic letter О; these names are still in use in the Church Slavonic alphabet.

Broad On is used only in the Church Slavonic language. In its alphabet (in primers and grammar books), broad and regular shapes of О share the same position, as they are not considered different letters. Uppercase is typically represented by broad Ѻ, and lowercase is either regular о or dual: both broad ѻ and regular о (in the same way as Greek uppercase Σ is accompanied with two lowercases σ, ς). Phonetically, broad Ѻ/ѻ is the same as regular О/о.

In standard Church Slavonic orthography (since the middle of the 17th century until present time), the broad shape of letter On is used instead of the regular shape of the same letter in the following cases:


 * as the first letter of a word's root, which could fall:
 * at the beginning of the word: ,
 * after a prefix: ,
 * after another root in compound words ;
 * in the middle of the root in two geographical names (&mdash;Jordan River, &mdash;city of Jaffa) and their derivatives;
 * as the numerical sign to represent the number 70 (However, Church Slavonic editions printed outside the Russian Empire have often ignored this rule and used regular о as the numerical sign).



Historically, Broad On was also used in the later Old Russian period, including documents, letters and other vernacular texts, to signal the initial position of a word or a syllable or occasionally to mark a closed vowel (developed in North Russian dialects since the 14th century). It is found in birch bark manuscripts and in some other Russian texts. Other glyphs could be used in the same functions, including Monocular O and Cyrillic Omega.

Name
Broad On has no standard traditional name. The names used in literature (broad/wide/round/initial on/o etc.) are just shape-based or functional descriptions. A name from certain Russian sources, он польское, on pol'skoye (literally, "Polish O"), also points to the round shape of the letter, because Latin fonts from Poland had round "O", and the typical old Cyrillic "O" was lens-shaped and condensed. Now the character is often being referred to by its conventional Unicode name "Round Omega", the fact that may lead to certain misunderstanding, because the Cyrillic letter Omega is a completely different letter; in particular, its numerical value is 800, not 70.