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This page is about the ligature, not the simple combination of the letters O and E. For initialisms and the word Oe, see Oe.

"Œ", "œ" is a vowel and a letter used in medieval and early modern Latin, and in modern French. The origin of the letter is a ligature for "O E". The character is also referred to by the name e�el, pronounced edh-@l.

The combination denotes a diphthong, IPA [oe], that had a value similar to English "OI". It was used in borrowings from Greek words having the diphthong "OI" ("ΟΙ"). Both classical and modern practice is to write the letters separately, but the ligature was used in medieval and early modern writings, in part because "Œ" was reduced to a simple long vowel (IPA [e:]) in late Latin.

In German "�" is the equivalent.

Borrowings into English from Latin words featuring "Œ" are often spelled "E", especially in American English. For example, foederal became federal in English, while foetus became fetus only in American English.

In French, "œ" has a purely aesthetic use, most prominent in the words cœur ("heart") and sœur ("sister"). While printed documents should ideally use œ systematically whenever "e" folllows "o" and is not marked with a diaresis, this usage is not always respected. Writing never makes the distinction between "oe" and "œ".

The symbol "œ" is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for a rounded open-mid front vowel. The small capital variant, i. e. ɶ (U+0276), stands for another vowel, a rounded open front one.

For computers, when using the Unicode character set, the codes for "Œ" and "œ" are respectively 338 and 339, or 152 and 153 in hexadecimal. In HTML, you can also use the HTML character entity references &OElig;and &oelig;.