Cyrillic Capital Letter Barred O

Cyrillic Capital Letter Barred O at U+04E8 represents a front rounded vowel letter used in several Cyrillic alphabets. It is an uppercase letter in the Cyrillic block, visually based on O with a horizontal bar through it, and its lowercase partner is commonly used for the same sound in running text. In Mongolian Cyrillic, it is a standard letter called ө and appears in everyday words and names, where it represents a vowel similar to German ö or French eu. For example, it occurs in words such as Өмнөговь and in Mongolian personal and place names transcribed in Cyrillic. It is also used in Turkic and Uralic languages written with Cyrillic, including Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Bashkir, and some Siberian language orthographies. In these contexts it usually marks a rounded front vowel distinct from plain О, so spelling pairs can differ by sound and meaning. The character is sometimes confused with Latin or Scandinavian-looking barred O letters, but in text processing it is a Cyrillic letter, not a Latin one. That distinction matters for search, sorting, transliteration, and mixed-script names.