O with Accent: Spanish ó, Italian ò, French ô, Portuguese õ

Which accented o matches the sound you want?

Pick an o with accent by the sound it stands for in your language, not by its look. The acute on ó marks stress in Spanish but an open vowel in Portuguese. The tilde on õ makes a nasal vowel in Portuguese and a different vowel in Estonian. The table pairs each letter with its job and one example.

Letter	Language	What the mark tells the reader	Example	Source
ó	Spanish	Where the stress falls; the vowel stays a plain o	cómo /komo/	City Tech rules, WikiPron
ó	Portuguese	An open o	nós /nɔs/	WikiPron, Priberam (avó)
ò	Italian	An open o in a stressed last syllable	però /perɔ/	Treccani, WikiPron
ô	French	A closed o; in côte, the trace of a lost s	côte [ko:t]	CNRTL
ô	Portuguese	A closed o	avô /avo/	WikiPron, Priberam (avô)
õ	Portuguese	A nasal vowel	põe /põj̃/	WikiPron
õ	Estonian	A vowel of its own, written e̮ in phonetic notation	Põlva	Eesti Keele Instituut
ō	Māori	A long o: short o as in walk, long ō as in bore		Massey University

Read the table the other way round when you know the sound but not the letter. For an open o, Portuguese writes ó and Italian writes ò. For a closed o, French and Portuguese both write ô. A nasal o is Portuguese õ, and a long o is Māori ō. Spanish ó is the odd one out: it changes the stress, not the vowel.

Two dots (ö) and a slash (ø) make letters with other jobs, so they are not on this page; copy them from the letter pad on the home page.

Does Spanish ó change the sound of the o?

No. In Spanish the mark on ó only shows which syllable carries the stress, and the vowel stays the same. WikiPron transcribes cómo as /komo/, with one o sound twice. The City Tech course on Spanish accent rules gives the main case: a word stressed on its last syllable takes the mark when it ends in a vowel, n or s, as in cantó and camión.

That rule covers most of the common Spanish words in the frequency table below: razón, corazón, habitación, pasó and adiós all stress the last syllable. Of the five accented o's on this page, the Unicode CLDR alphabet of Spanish holds only ó.

Some ó's tell two words apart instead. A note from the Real Academia Española, dated 9 March 2023, lists cómo and como, and dónde and donde, among the pairs where the mark separates a stressed word from an unstressed one.

The same note settles sólo. The rule goes back to the 2010 Ortografía: the adverb solo is written with no mark, and the mark is optional only where the writer judges a sentence ambiguous. Film subtitles have not caught up: sólo still sits near cómo in the FrequencyWords list.

The same edition took the mark off the word o, or, when it stands between figures. The old ó was there so that the o could not pass for a zero. The RAE's summary of the 2010 changes (opens in a new tab) says the spaces around it already do that job, since 1 o 2 cannot be read as 102. Its example is 3 o 4 días, where older advice wrote 3 ó 4.

Why does Italian ò sit at the end of a word?

Italian writes the accent when the stress falls on the last syllable, and Treccani's entry on vowels says that an open o there takes the grave: ò, as in andò. WikiPron transcribes può as /pwɔ/ and però as /perɔ/, both with the open vowel /ɔ/.

Verb endings put ò there all the time. Treccani's entry on stress names the third person of the passato remoto (cantò) and the first person of the future (canterò) as forms stressed on the last syllable. That is why farò, sarò, dirò and andrò are on the Italian list of common ò words.

Italian has an ó for a closed o too, but writes it mostly to tell words apart. Treccani's example is còrso, a person from Corsica, against córso, from the verb correre. The CLDR alphabet of Italian lists ò and not ó.

What does French ô change in côte and cote?

In côte, French ô stands for a closed o. The CNRTL dictionary transcribes côte as [ko:t] and the noun cote as [kɔt]. The two words differ only by the hat, and the hat moves the vowel from the open o of cote to the closed o of côte.

The hat also keeps a piece of history. CNRTL notes that the Académie dictionaries of 1694 and 1718 spelled the word coste, and that the circumflex stands for the lost s. Words of the same family keep the ô and, in principle, the closed vowel: côté, côtelette, côtier.

CNRTL admits that côté wavers between the closed and the open o; WikiPron transcribes it /kote/. Other common French ô words include plutôt, bientôt, tôt, hôtel and hôpital. French writes no ó, ò or õ in its CLDR alphabet.

Portuguese ô is the same character with a similar sound: WikiPron gives avô as /avo/, a closed o. Its job differs, though. In côte, French ô records a lost s, while Portuguese ô stands against ó, so avô and avó are two words.

Is the õ of Portuguese the same as the õ of Estonian?

No. In Portuguese the tilde makes the vowel nasal: WikiPron transcribes põe as /põj̃/. Most of the common õ words in the Portuguese frequency list end in -ões, such as milhões, informações, razões and condições.

Portuguese also writes ó and ô, and swapping them changes the word. Priberam defines avó as grandmother and avô as grandfather. WikiPron gives ó an open o, as in nós /nɔs/, and ô a closed one, as in avô /avo/.

Estonian õ is not a nasal o at all. The Institute of the Estonian Language writes most sounds with the letters of the alphabet in its phonetic notation, but not õ: ordinary õ becomes e̮, a modified e, in names such as Põlva and Nõo. Estonian given names with õ include Tõnu and Tõnis, and GeoNames lists Põhja-Tallinn.

Which accented o does a name need?

A name keeps the accent of its own language, so copy it exactly as its owner writes it. Wikidata lists Óscar and Òscar as two different given names. The CLDR alphabet of Catalan holds both ó and ò, while Spanish holds only ó, so only one of the two spellings can be Spanish.

The same Wikidata list shows how far the letters travel: Ildikó and József with ó, Niccolò with ò, Jérôme and Antônio with ô, and Õnne with õ.

GeoNames adds places: Córdoba and Asunción with ó, Biên Hòa in Vietnam with ò, Buôn Ma Thuột with ô and Três Corações in Brazil with õ. To software, Óscar and Òscar differ in one code point, U+00D3 against U+00D2, so an exact match on names keeps the two apart.

Where do you write ō instead of a plain o?

Write ō where a language marks a long vowel with a line. Massey University's guide to Māori pronunciation says macrons show long vowels and can change the meaning of a word. It compares short o to the vowel of walk and long ō to the vowel of bore. The CLDR alphabets also list ō for Tongan, Silesian and Kuvi.

You also meet ō in Japanese names written in Latin letters, such as the given names Tarō, Yōko and Shinzō in Wikidata. ō, U+014D, has no Alt code, because Windows code page 1252 (opens in a new tab), where the Alt codes point, has no place for it. The Symbols tab of the Windows emoji panel (Win+.) has it.