О, the letter o

History

O is the sixteenth letter of the modern Russian alphabet and one of its vowels. Across the Cyrillic alphabets it most commonly represents /ɔ/, close to the vowel written au in the English word aura; in Russian, as in Serbo-Croatian, it represents /o/.

Nothing in the sources points to a specific cursive look-alike for this letter. What they do record is general and still useful at the desk: most handwritten Russian, in personal letters and in schoolwork especially, uses the cursive alphabet instead of the block letters seen in printed material, and it is standard practice to write in Russian cursive almost exclusively, unlike Latin handwriting, where mixed and near-printed systems are common. Modern Cyrillic italic typefaces are in their lowercase part based mostly on those cursive shapes, which is why an italic printed page can look closer to a manuscript than an upright one does.

Russian cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of skoropis, the rapid or running script that was the 14th to 17th century chancery hand of the earlier Cyrillic bookhands called ustav and poluustav, and it became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script.

This letter also marks one of the clearest dividing lines between older and modern spelling. The reform of 1917 to 1918 replaced the genitive adjectival ending -аго with -ого in most instances, so новаго became нового; after ж, ц, ч, ш and щ it gave -его instead, so лучшаго became лучшего, and -яго became -его in the same way, as ранняго became раннего. The older -аго spellings reflect Church Slavonic influence, while Old East Slavic documents mostly used -ого and -его.