Coptic Capital Letter O

Use a Unicode-aware Coptic keyboard for repeated text. A legacy font mapping can show the expected shape while storing a different character, so the text may fail when opened on another device.

What does Coptic O mean?

Coptic O marks an o vowel; its sound varies by tradition. Reconstructed readings for Sahidic and Bohairic (two Coptic varieties) use an open o, roughly like the vowel in English “saw”; traditional Bohairic church reading uses a closer o, roughly like “go.”

Before the standard Coptic alphabet, Egyptian writers used Greek-derived letters in an early alphabetic way to write Egyptian, called Old Coptic. It also used signs from Demotic, a later Egyptian script, for sounds Greek letters lacked. Surviving Old Coptic texts include a prayer and horoscopes from the first or second century AD. Coptic later became the language of Christian worship and manuscripts.

Before modern editions, Coptic manuscripts did not use a modern uppercase/lowercase distinction; scribes could enlarge a passage's first letter, and modern editors make a separate casing choice. The Unicode Standard distinguishes Sahidic and Bohairic font styles; as of 2026, a font without Coptic coverage may show a missing-glyph box or use a fallback font.