The letter O in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 1, 3 and 5 zigzag down the cell. o is e plus dot 3 — a useful pairing to drill, since both are extremely common letters.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and O is part of the family that starts with e. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. Learning the family together is far faster than learning O on its own, because one shape gives you three letters. All twenty-six letters are laid out family by family.

Where O turns up in Grade 2

O is not one of the letters that stands for a whole word on its own, but it does appear inside contractions that combine it with another letter.

A contraction is one cell doing the work of two or more letters, which is why a Grade 2 page is roughly a quarter shorter than the same text in Grade 1. The complete Grade 2 reference lists all of them with the position rules that govern when they may be used.

Writing a capital O

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital O is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from O by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with O, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.