Broad On


Broad On is a positional and orthographical variant of the Cyrillic letter O .
Broad On is used only in the Church Slavonic language. In its alphabet, broad and regular shapes of О/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. Phonetically, broad Ѻ/ѻ is the same as regular О/о.
In standard Church Slavonic orthography, the broad shape of letter On is used instead of the regular shape of the same letter in the following cases:
.
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. 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 are just shape-based or functional descriptions. A name from certain Russian sources, он польское, on pol'skoye, 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.

Computing codes