O is the fifteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled o (), plural oes."O" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1999); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993). History The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin (eye), which represented a consonant, probably the voiced pharyngeal fricative (), the sound represented by the Arabic letter ? called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a similar Egyptian hieroglyph for "eye". The Greeks are thought to have come up with the innovation of vowel characters, and lacking a pharyngeal consonant, employed this letter as the Greek O to represent the vowel , a sound it maintained in Etruscan and Latin. In Greek, a variation of the form later came to distinguish this long sound (Omega, meaning "large