Cursive O (Capital & Lowercase)

How to Write a Cursive Capital O

1. Start at the top line. Put your pencil on the top line, a little right of center. The capital O is written counterclockwise, so you'll move to the left first.
2. Go down the left side. Curve to the left and down in a long, slanted arc that reaches the baseline. Keep the shape tall and narrow rather than round.
3. Come up the right side. Round off along the baseline and climb back up the right side until you're near the top line again.
4. Loop inside the top. Close the oval at the top, then keep going and curl a small loop just inside the top of the letter. It dips toward the midline but doesn't touch it.
5. Cross out with a tail. Finish by drawing a short tail to the right that crosses the right side of the oval and ends outside it, above the midline. Then lift your pencil.

How to Write a Lowercase o in Cursive

1. Start at the midline. Place your pencil on the dashed midline. In a word, the joining stroke from the previous letter brings you up to this point.
2. Curve to the left. Move counterclockwise, curving left and down toward the baseline.
3. Round the bottom. Sweep along the baseline and come back up the right side, keeping the same slant as your other letters.
4. Close the top. Bring the stroke back to where you started so the o is fully closed. An open top makes it look like a u.
5. Exit at the midline. If a letter follows, leave from the top of the o with a short stroke that runs across at the midline.

Common Mistakes With Cursive O

O seems like the easiest letter there is, which is why these slips are so common.

• Going clockwise. Both forms of O are written counterclockwise, like a, c and d. Going the other way makes the joins awkward.
• Leaving the capital without its loop. A plain oval can be mistaken for a zero. The small loop and tail at the top are what make it a cursive capital O.
• A round, upright oval. The O should lean with the slant of your writing and be taller than it is wide.
• Leaving the lowercase o open. If the top doesn't close, the o reads as a u or a v. Finish the oval before you exit.
• Dropping the exit to the baseline. The lowercase o leaves at the midline, not the baseline. Pulling the exit down makes the next letter start in the wrong place.

How Cursive O Connects to Other Letters

In the traditional style, the capital O doesn't join the next letter. After the tail, lift your pencil and start the following letter on its own, close beside the O, as in Oscar and Olive. That small gap is normal and expected.

The lowercase o is different: it always joins, and it's one of the letters that exits high. The join leaves from the top of the o and runs across at the midline, so the next letter starts from above instead of from the baseline. You can see this in book and cool, where the two o's are linked by a short bridge at the midline.

Joining into an o is easy too. The stroke from the previous letter rises to the midline and curves straight into the top of the oval, as in ocean.

Copy and Paste Cursive Uppercase O Symbols

These are Unicode symbols, not real handwriting. They look like script and paste into most apps, but each one is a separate character, so they won't join like pen strokes. Use them for names, bios and captions.

• 𝒪𝒽 ℳ𝓎Copy
• 𝒪𝒸ℯ𝒶𝓃Copy
• 𝒪𝓃𝓁𝓎 ℒℴ𝓋ℯCopy
• 𝒪𝒶𝓈𝒾𝓈Copy

Words That Start With O

The capital O mostly appears at the start of names and sentences, while the lowercase o shows up everywhere. Practice both with these words.

• Short words: on, of, odd, oak, oil, old, own, owl
• Longer words: ocean, orange, octopus, onion, open, office, orbit, oven
• Double o and middle o: book, cool, moon, food, door, robot, lemon, window
• Names and places: Oscar, Olive, Olivia, Owen, Oliver, Ohio, Oregon, Oslo

Write the capital O in a few names, then pick up your pencil and start the next letter. Practicing that lift on purpose keeps it from feeling like a mistake.