Å
Å (lowercase å) is a Latin-alphabet letter formed by placing a ring above the letter A, used as a distinct letter in the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Walloon writing systems.1 In Unicode it is encoded as U+00C5 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE and U+00E5 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE in the Latin-1 Supplement block.2
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Unicode code points | U+00C5 (Å) and U+00E5 (å), Latin-1 Supplement2 |
| Canonical decomposition | å ≡ 0061 a + 030A ◌̊ COMBINING RING ABOVE1 |
| Languages | Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Walloon, per the Unicode names list1 |
| Alphabet position | In Swedish, a distinct letter of the alphabet following z3 |
| Sound in Swedish | Renders a higher pronunciation of the original long [a], which changed to [o] during the late Middle Ages4 |
| Look-alike character | U+212B ANGSTROM SIGN, a separate code point with a similar glyph2 |
| Substitution rule | In Swedish, aa is the accepted alternative where Å cannot be used, though no longer recommended5 |
History in Swedish and Danish
The character å entered Swedish writing with the New Testament translation Nya testamentet of 1526 and was spread more broadly by the printed Swedish Bible of 1541.4 It rendered a higher pronunciation of the original long [a], a vowel that had shifted to [o] during the late Middle Ages; older spellings such as tha, war, and swa correspond to modern Swedish då, vår, and så.4
In Danish, the question of whether å should replace the digraph aa had been discussed since the late 1700s, and texts written before 1948 can already be found that use å.6
Status as a separate letter
In the Swedish language, å is considered a distinct letter of the alphabet, following the letter z, rather than a variant of A.3 • 5 The .se internationalized domain name table for Swedish states that the letter Å is not considered a variant of the letter A, and that the digraph aa is the accepted alternative in contexts where Å cannot be used; earlier practice substituted aa, which is no longer recommended but is still encountered.5
Sorting reflects this letter status. The Unicode code chart order does not by itself provide an alphabetical ordering for lexicographic comparison, because the expected sort sequence for the same characters differs across languages.3 In the Swedish collation tailoring of the Common Locale Data Repository, å and Å are ordered after z and Z and before ä, Ä, ö, and Ö.7 The Unicode Collation Algorithm treats base letter differences at the first (primary) level and accent differences at the second (secondary) level, and it can tailor a letter to map to a sequence of more than one collation element where a language requires it, as English collations may do for letters equivalent to multi-letter sequences.8
Encoding details
The lowercase å carries the canonical decomposition 0061 a + 030A ◌̊ (COMBINING RING ABOVE), meaning the letter can be represented either as the precomposed code point U+00E5 or as the sequence A plus the combining ring.1 The two representations are equivalent under Unicode normalization, which returns one binary representation when given any of the equivalent binary representations of a character.9 The Unicode FAQ treats å, whether written as A + COMBINING RING or precomposed as A WITH RING, as a single grapheme in the Danish writing system.10
A visually similar but distinct character is U+212B ANGSTROM SIGN, which Unicode encodes separately from U+00C5 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE even though the glyphs look nearly identical.2 The Angstrom sign's decomposition points to U+00C5, so the two characters normalize together.1
Use beyond the Scandinavian national languages
The Unicode names list records Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Walloon as sample languages of use for å.1 The Lule Saami alphabet as used in Sweden, which follows the orthography of the national language as its basis, includes Å/å (U+00C5/U+00E5) among the characters it adds to the basic Roman alphabet, alongside Ä and Ö.11
References
- Chapter 24, About the Code Charts, The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0.0
- Dealing with glyphs and characters, Document numérique 2013/3
- The Unicode Standard, Version 12.0, Chapter 2
- Swedish, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford Academic
- .SE Swedish Character Table, IANA IDN tables
- Bogstavet å, sproget.dk
- Swedish collation chart, CLDR Version 27
- UTS #10: Unicode Collation Algorithm
- Collation, sorting, and string comparison, Microsoft Learn
- FAQ - Characters and Combining Marks, Unicode
- Sweden Toponymic Factfile
Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script
Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026
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