Ring (diacritic) - Ring Above

Ring Above

In Unicode, the above encoding is: U+030A ◌̊ combining ring above (HTML: ̊).

The Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Walloon character Å (å) is typically seen as an A with a ring above. However, in the languages in which it is used, the letter is seen as a distinct symbol, rather than an A with a diacritic. The letter Å is the symbol of the unit ångström, named after the Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström.

The character Ů (ů; a Latin U with ring above, or kroužek in Czech) is a grapheme in the Czech language preserved for historic reasons, which identifies a vowel shift. For example, the word for "horse" used to be written kóň, which evolved, along with pronunciation, into kuoň. Ultimately, the vowel disappeared completely, and the uo evolved into ů, modern form kůň. The letter ů now has the same pronunciation as the letter ú (long ), but changes to a short o when a word is morphed (e.g. nom. kůň → gen. koně, nom. dům → gen. domu), thus showing the historical evolution of the language. Ů cannot occur in initial position, however, ú occurs almost exclusively in initial position or at the beginning of a word root in a compound. These characters are used also in Steuer's Silesian alphabet. The pronunciation has prevailed in some Moravian dialects, as well as in the Slovak language, which uses the letter ô instead of ů.

The ring is also used in Bolognese (a dialect of Emiliano-Romagnolo language) to distinguish the sound /ɑ/ (å) from /a/ (a).

The ring has been used in the Lithuanian Cyrillic alphabet promoted by Russian authorities in the last quarter of 19th century with the letter У̊ / у̊ used to represent the /wɔ/ diphthong (now written uo in Lithuanian orthography).

Many more characters can be created in Unicode using the "combining ring above" U+030A, including the above mentioned у̊ (Cyrillic у with ring above) or even ń̊ (n with acute and ring above). The standalone ring above symbol has the codepoint U+02DA.