   thumb o (named o , plural oes)"o" oxford english dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); chambers-happap, "oes" op. cit. oes is the plural of the name of the letter. the plural of the letter itself is rendered os, o's, os, o's. is the 15th letter and a vowel in the iso basic latin alphabet. ==history== its graphic form has remained fairly constant from phoenician times until today. the name of the phoenician letter was Ê¿eyn, meaning "eye", and indeed its shape originates simply as a drawing of a human eye (possibly inspired by the corresponding egyptian hieroglyph, c.f. proto-sinaitic script). its original sound value was that of a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the cognate arabic letter letter Ø¹ Ê¿ayn. the use of this phoenician letter for a vowel sound is due to the early greek alphabets, which adopted the letter as o "omicron" to represent the vowel . the letter was adopted with this value in the old italic alphabets, including the early latin alphabet. in greek, a variation of the form later came to distinguish this long sound (omega, meaning "large o") from the short o (omicron, meaning "small o"). greek omicron gave rise to the corresponding cyrillic letter o and the early italic letter to runic á. even alphabets constructed "from scratch", i.e. not derived from semitic, usually have similar forms to represent this sound, e.g.; the creators of the afaka and ol chiki scripts, each invented in different parts of the world in the last century, both attributed their vowels for 'o' to the shape of the mouth when making this sound. ==use in english== the letter o is the fourth most common letter in the english alphabet.english letter frequency like the other english vowel letters, it has associated "long" and "short" pronunciations. the "long o" as in boat is actually most often a diphthong  (realized dialectically anywhere from  to ). in english there is also a "short o" as in fox, , which sounds slightly different in different dialects. in most dialects of british english, it is either an open-mid back rounded vowel  or an open back rounded vowel ; in american english, it is most commonly an unro
ISO_basic_Latin_letters Vowel_letters