The Letter O

By Allan Haley

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Some believe that our present O evolved from a Phoenician symbol; others vote for an even more ancient Egyptian heiroglyph as the source. The most fanciful explanation, though, is offered by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories. “How the Alphabet was Made” recounts how a Neolithic tribesman and his precocious daughter invent the alphabet by drawing pictures to represent sounds. After finishing the A and Y (inspired by the mouth and tail of a carp), the child, Taffy, asks her father to make another sound that she can translate into a picture.

‘Now make another noise, daddy.’

‘Oh!’ said her Daddy, very loud.

‘That’s quite easy,‘ said Taffy. ’You make your mouth all around like an egg or a stone. So an egg or a stone will do for that.’

‘You can’t always find eggs or stones. We’ll have to scratch a round something like one.’ And he drew this.

The father’s sketch of the first O would serve perfectly well today, since round remains the defining property of the letter. Actually, the O did start out as a drawing of something, but not an egg or a stone, or even a mouth. The true ancestor of our O was probably the symbol for an eye, complete with a center dot for the pupil. The symbol for eye, “ayin” (pronounced “eye-in”) appears among the Phoenician and other Semitic languages around 1000 B.C.

The Greeks adapted the ayin to their communication system and used it to represent the short vowel sound of ‘o.’ The Greeks also changed the name of the letter to Omicron. (The Omega is another Greek O, which they invented to represent the long ‘o’ sound.)

While the Phoenicians and the Greeks drew the letter as a true, nearly perfect circle, the Romans condensed the shape slightly to be more in keeping with their other monumental capitals.

• Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs. He is also responsible for editorial content for the company’s type libraries and Web sites.
• Prior to working for Monotype, Mr. Haley was Principal of Resolution, a consulting firm with expertise in fonts, font technology, type and typographic communication. He was also executive vice president of International Typeface Corporation.
• Mr. Haley is ex officio Chairman of the Board of the Society of Typographic Aficionados, and past President of the New York Type Directors Club. He is highly regarded as an educator and is a frequently requested speaker at national computer and design conferences.
• Mr. Haley is also a prolific writer, with five books on type and graphic communication and hundreds of articles for graphic design publications to his credit.