O (phoneme)

For a note on how AWE organizes its group of articles on vowels, basically by aspects of sound and of writing, see category:vowels.

Few symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet can be described as 'o' or 'o-like'. This page lists them, as they are used in the phonemic description of RP English. Each symbol links to a separate page listing the sounds which it can represent.

There is another page at O (grapheme) which deals with the way the written sign O (or o) is used in writing English in the Roman alphabet, on its own or as part of a digraph. O (grapheme) represents a wide variety of sounds - not all of them represented by 'o-like' symbols in the IPA.

• Monophthong
  • /ɔː/, as in 'all', 'caught' and 'ought'.
• Diphthong
  • /ɔɪ/, as in 'boy', 'voice' and 'why'.
    • /oÊŠ/ is the normal transcription of the American realization of the '-o-' sound realized in RP as /əʊ/: see below at /əʊ/.
• Two of the commonest sounds represented by '-o-' in written English are shown by IPA symbols that do not themselves resemble 'o':
  • /É’/, the sound of 'got', 'off' and 'cough; and
  • (in RP) /əʊ/, the sound of 'go', 'know', 'toe' - and the name of the letter itself, O, /əʊ/. (Transcriptions of American English usually show this as /oÊŠ/.)
• The pure /o/ vowel of the IPA is not a sound normally heard in English. Varieties of it are common in Italian, French and the North Germanic languages.

Much of the information on this page has been taken from McArthur and Bell (2004).