A with Circle (å Å): an O Sound, Once Aa, Same as Ångström

Why does the a with a circle sound like an o?

The a with circle sounds like an o because the vowel moved and the spelling kept its a. Wiktionary's Norwegian entry for å (opens in a new tab) traces the sound to the long á of Old Norse, said /ɑː/. It was rounded to /ɔː/ and then raised to /oː/ across much of mainland Scandinavia. Writers first spelled it aa, a doubled a, and then put the second letter on top.

Two sources tell the shape's story a little differently. The same Wiktionary entry says the upper a shrank, step by step, into a ring. ISOF, the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore, writes (opens in a new tab) that å was first an a with a small o above it. Either way, the mark that makes people search for an a with circle on top is a letter that lost its size, not an accent added later.

Language	What the letter is called	Its sound, per Wiktionary	The word år, year
Swedish	å	/oː/, short /ɔ/	/oːr/
Norwegian Bokmål	å	/oː/, short /ɔ/	/oːɾ/
Danish	å, or bolle-å	[ˈɔˀ]	/ɔːˀr/, [ˈɒˀ]
Finnish	ruotsalainen oo, Swedish o	/o/
Skolt Sami	å	/ɔ/
Chamorro	å	/ɑ/

The år column comes from Wiktionary's entry for år (opens in a new tab). One word, the same meaning, and three slightly different o sounds. In Norwegian, the usage note adds, the long /oː/ is usually written å, while a short /ɔ/ is more often written o.

The Chamorro row is the reminder that a letter is not a sound. Walloon goes further. Wikipedia's article on Å (opens in a new tab) says its common spelling uses one å for a long open o, a long closed o or a long a, depending on the local dialect, as in måjhon, house.

What does the word å mean?

On its own, å is also a word, and its meaning changes at each border: a river in Sweden and Denmark, the little word "to" in Norway. The Wiktionary entries for å (opens in a new tab) and Å (opens in a new tab) give these senses.

Where	The word å	An example from Wiktionary
Swedish	a river or a creek, usually bigger than a bäck and smaller than an älv	Gå inte över ån efter vatten: don't cross the stream to get water
Danish	a river, creek or stream, used only of rivers in Denmark	set beside bæk, a smaller stream, and flod, never used in Denmark
Norwegian Bokmål	to, the marker before an infinitive	Hun liker å lese: she likes to read
Norwegian Bokmål	oh, an interjection	Å, er det deg? Oh, is that you?
Norway	Å, a fishing village in Moskenes, at the southwestern end of Lofoten	a place name, with a capital

The Norwegian "to" was spelled at until the reform of 1917, although speakers already said it as /ɔ/. That reform is the one that brought the letter å into Norwegian. And because å sounds just like og, and, Wiktionary warns that Norwegians often mix the two up in writing.

When did aa become å, and where does å sort?

The three Scandinavian languages took the letter at very different times, and that decided its place. ISOF's answer on the order (opens in a new tab) says Swedish printed å from 1526, in the New Testament, while Norwegian and Danish kept the double aa. When the two finally switched, they put the new letter at the end.

Language	When å came in	Its place in the alphabet	Source for the place
Swedish	in print from 1526	after z, first of å, ä, ö	CLDR Swedish chart
Norwegian	1917, already allowed in Bokmål from 1907	last, after æ and ø	CLDR Norwegian chart
Danish	1948, by order no. 128	last, after æ and ø, by an order of 8 February 1955	Nyt fra Sprognævnet 1997/4
Finnish	only ever in Scandinavian names	after z, first of å, ä, ö	CLDR Finnish chart

The places come from the CLDR collation charts for Swedish (opens in a new tab), Norwegian (opens in a new tab) and Finnish (opens in a new tab), and the Danish order of 1955 is quoted in Nyt fra Sprognævnet 1997/4 (opens in a new tab).

The Norwegian dates come from Wiktionary, which adds that a Scandinavian spelling meeting in Stockholm proposed å for all three languages back in 1869. The Danish change is § 2 of order no. 128 (opens in a new tab). It covered ordinary words and Nordic place names, år, stå, Århus, Umeå, Ålesund, and it left personal names alone. That is why a Dane can still be called Aage.

Place names got their aa back in 1984, when the University of Copenhagen's name researchers (opens in a new tab) say the two spellings became optional. Aarhus has been correct since 1 January 2011, at the town's wish, and Århus always will be. The Danish alphabet page tells the Aabenraa side of the story, and the Swedish alphabet page explains the å, ä, ö order.

Does software treat å as a with a mark?

Software treats the a with circle as a plain a with a mark only when it is set to a language that does. The question is a real one: in Google's US results for å on 2026-10-20, one of the top ten was a bug report against the Swift Foundation library, issue #567 (opens in a new tab), titled "Swedish å, ä, ö are treated as diacritics". We tested the locale-aware compare in Node.js v26.0.0, which runs ICU 78.3 with CLDR 48 data, on 2026-10-20.

Rules used	Reads aa as å	Files Å after Z	Finds Umeå when you type Umea, accents ignored
Danish	yes	yes	no
Norwegian Bokmål	yes	yes	no
Swedish	no	yes	no
Finnish	no	yes	no
English	no	no	yes

English is the control, and it behaves like the bug report says: once accents are ignored, å is just a. Under every Nordic rule set the ring makes another letter, so a search for Umea misses Umeå.

Swedish and Finnish rules also treat aa as two a's, while Danish and Norwegian rules file it with å, as their CLDR charts say. The usual way to strip accents is to decompose the text and delete every combining mark, and it turns Umeå into Umea in every language.

So a site for Nordic readers should keep the ring and sort by the reader's language. If people may type the name without a ring, store that spelling as well, rather than letting the software fold å into a.

Is the Ångström sign the same character as Å?

To software, the Ångström sign and the a with circle are the same letter after one step. Unicode has a separate ANGSTROM SIGN, U+212B, and UnicodeData.txt (opens in a new tab) gives it a canonical decomposition of a single character: U+00C5, the letter Å. Unicode Standard Annex #15, Normalization Forms (opens in a new tab), calls such characters singletons. They never remain in text after normalization, and since Å is the preferred form, both normalize to the letter.

We checked the three ways of writing Å in Node.js v26.0.0 and in Python 3.14.6 on 2026-10-20. Both gave the same normal forms and the same lowercase.

You have	Code points	UTF-8 bytes	After NFC	Lowercased
Å, the letter	U+00C5	C3 85	U+00C5	å, U+00E5
Å, the Ångström sign	U+212B	E2 84 AB	U+00C5	å, U+00E5
A plus the combining ring	U+0041 U+030A	41 CC 8A	U+00C5	a plus the ring

The sign looks the same and sorts the same, but a plain text search does not find it. In our test, a search for the sign inside the word Ångström, typed with the letter, found nothing until both strings were normalized to NFC. HTML takes the letter's side as well. In the WHATWG list of entities (opens in a new tab), Å resolves to U+00C5, the letter, not to U+212B.

The unit honours Anders Jonas Ångström, a Swedish physicist who lived from 1814 to 1874, and Wiktionary's Nynorsk entry calls the symbol an initialism of his name. For a length of one ångström, type the ordinary letter with Shift+Option+A or Alt+0197. It is what the sign turns into anyway.

Which other letters carry the ring above?

Very few letters share the ring of the a with circle, and besides å only ů is in an alphabet that CLDR lists. The ring itself is COMBINING RING ABOVE, U+030A, in UnicodeData.txt. Each letter below breaks down into a base letter and that ring; ǻ adds an acute on top of å.

Letter	Unicode name	Breaks down into	Alphabets with it, per CLDR
å	LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE	a + U+030A	Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and others
ů	LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH RING ABOVE	u + U+030A	Czech
ǻ	LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE AND ACUTE	å + U+0301	none
ẘ	LATIN SMALL LETTER W WITH RING ABOVE	w + U+030A	none
ẙ	LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH RING ABOVE	y + U+030A	none

The Czech ů is the closest relative in use. Wiktionary's entry for ů (opens in a new tab) gives it as /uː/, the same sound as ú, so a Czech ring marks a long u, not an o. It is on the Czech alphabet page. The ẘ, which Unicode encodes only in small form, is explained on w with accent.