Horn: Vietnamese ơ and ư

Uses and scope

Vietnamese treats ơ and ư as vowel letters. They can take acute, grave, hook above, tilde or dot below for tone. Thus the horn in ở and the hook above it do different jobs. The unmarked-tone forms ơ and ư still retain the horn as part of the vowel spelling. [45], [3], [4]

Similar shapes, different characters

Do not replace the horn with a raised comma or apostrophe after o or u. The complete letters have canonical base-plus-horn decompositions, and additional marks are ordered by the normalization rules. A font's apparent attachment to the right of a letter does not mean that the horn is stored before it. [1], [2], [45], [3], [4]

Typing and text forms

Copying is exact; preview circles are excluded. Compare normalization forms.

Word for Windows

Select a hex code, then Alt+X; repeat for each scalar.

Mac and mobile

Hold a letter for supported variants; use Character Viewer on Mac or a language keyboard on mobile.

HTML

Use UTF-8 text or the numeric references in Details, in order.

Full typing instructions ·HTML, CSS and JavaScript entry ·Verified Alt codes.

Sources and method

Usage statements link to the authority that supports their scope. Character names, categories, combining classes and normalization results come from the pinned Unicode data. A canonical decomposition does not establish language membership or spelling frequency.

Source access date: 2026-09-14.

• [4] Unicode combining mark names and annotations. Names, cross references and narrowly attributed usage annotations. Historical annotations are not automatically current recommendations.
• [45] Northern Illinois University: Vietnamese tones. Six Vietnamese tone categories and example spellings. Detailed pitch descriptions are not generalized across dialects.
• [3] Unicode 17: Latin, Greek and combining marks. Sections 7.1, 7.2, 7.8 and 7.9: encoded distinctions, script conventions and glyph variation, not a complete orthography.
• [1] Unicode Character Database 17.0.0.
• [2] Unicode normalization, UAX #15.
• [10] Microsoft: Unicode character entry in Word.
• [11] Apple: enter characters with accent marks.
• [12] Google: use Gboard.
• [13] Unicode: fonts and keyboards FAQ.
• [14] HTML numeric character references.

Read the editorial method and inspect the underlying datasets.