I’ve always found this digraph to be as cloying (for me) as the historical ligatures st and ct. They call too much attention to themselves. I suppose for specific settings or maybe artistic settings they are useful though. The second from the left works best for me. The first and last (top line) read as CE to me.
Good point.
People with these digraphs in their alphabet (eg Scandinavian languages) don’t have that “CE” problem, but for English usage of Œ as a ligature, a more “O-ish” left half might be better.
Well, Scandinavian languages don’t use œ (you might be thinking of ø or ö). French is the only prominent modern language I can think of that uses œ, as in your example œuf.
I have no problems with the lowercase œ, but the designs of the uppercase Œ often do bother me, and I sometimes wonder if a form where an O with minimal optical distortion just touches E might work better at least for those who don’t use this grapheme* on a daily basis. But we will also have to consult native French speakers on this one.
* I use digraph to mean a two-letter combination used for writing a single sound, such as th and ng in thing.
I like it. The U&lc more than the small-caps, as the ‘E’ unfortunately is straight on its left, and therefore tends to clog the gap.
How frequent are ‘Æ’ in ‘Œ’ in French, Danish and Norwegian?
This remarkable illustration is taken from a French primer (1967):
Learning the letter ‘e’: An ‘oeuf’ looks like an ‘o’ – but sounds like an ‘e’. (The derivation sequence is a little bit bloated; what exactly happens between 2/3 and 5/6?)
Just wanted to add that, sorry for the digression.
Edit. People may be less careful when writing “oeuf” than “oeuvre” (“Les Oeuvres du Cardinal Léger” becomes “The Endeavors of Cardinal Léger” in English). But there are so many French recipes... Who knows, at least when printed on paper. But don’t forget, there are also “hors d’oeuvres”, that are quite important in French cuisine. And there is also “main d’oeuvre” (manpower).
In French, there’s also bœuf (beef), cœur (hearth), manœuvre (operate), chef-d’œuvre (masterpiece), contrecœur (back-plate) and some others…
In any case, there’s nearly no occasion where the Œ ligature (or diagraph or grapheme) will be use with lower cases (the only possibilities are «œuf» or «œuvre» as the first noun of a book title. A sentence couldn’t begin with a common noun. So, mainly, this gliph will be use in an all lower cases or an all upper cases word.
As for reading CE, it’s a matter of habitude, I think. As a French reader, I would never have tought of this but have read OE by recognizing the character and the word instantly.
Just a simple remark : if I type “boeuf” instead of “bœuf” in Word on my sister’s PC, the word is automatically replaced by “bœuf” by the spell checker: if I can manage to get “boeuf” in the text, I get a mistake. Of course, if “œ” is not in the font, the result is a square for the missing character. The same holds for “Œ”.
«How frequent are ‘Æ’ in ‘Œ’ in French, Danish and Norwegian?»
Since œ in French has already been dealt with by native French-speakers, I’ll speak only of æ in Danish and Norwegian (and also in Icelandic and Faeroese—or should that be Færœse? :-P).
Æ is very common in Danish and, unlike in French, it is not thought of as an actual combination of the letters a and e in the minds of the common Dane. Whereas a French person might easily type oeuvre, rather than œuvre, without really considering it ‘un-French’, no Dane would ever type ae, but always æ. The letter is about as common as ä is in German, perhaps slightly less so, since umlauts are more common in German than in Danish. As in German, æ is pronounced as [ɛ] in Danish (and Swedish, where it’s a bit more open).
In Norwegian, æ is less common than in Danish; many words where Danish uses æ (and German and Swedish use ä), Norwegian uses e instead: D æbler, S äpplen, G Äpfeln, but N epler (‘apples’). It’s pronounced [æ] in Norwegian.
In Icelandic and Faeroese, it’s even less common. In Faeroese, where it’s pronounced [æ] as in Norwegian, it’s used in a number of very common words where it’s a very strange development of an old Germanic i or Scandinavian é, such as F mær, tær, I mér, þér, G mir, dir (dative of ‘me, thou’), but apart from that, its usage is similar to Icelandic, where it’s only used as old i-umlauts of Old Norse a and is not that common. In Icelandic, it’s pronounced [ai], a diphthong.
As for the digraphs themselves, I’ve never liked the uppercase Œ, either. In some fonts, they manage to get away with it and make it look sort of harmonic. The Cardinal Léger text above is a good example of that. But most commonly, it just looks like the poor O has had its skin pulled too taut, making it all warped stretched. Not pretty. I’ve never read it as a CE, though. More commonly (due to sheer ingrained habit, I suppose), I’ll instinctively read it as an æ instead, so œufs becomes æufs, which in turn becomes complete nonsense in my head and makes me stumble in reading.
1. The vertical beam of the ɑ is retained, so there’s a vertical stroke between the ɑ and the e, or the curvature of the ɑ is made uneven, so it closes up towards the top right corner, rather than being properly circular (if that explanation makes sense). But they do end up looking rather similar. (Avant Garde uses the former way, fonts like Ayuthara—first one in my list of fonts that applies—do it the second way)
2. The ɑ is replaced by a two-storey a. (Futura does this)
I should have been more clear: My question wasn’t about the frequency of ‘æ’ and ‘œ’, but ‘Æ’ and ‘Œ’, i.e. uppercase. And the answer given by Alexandre (for French) is as I had expected:
In any case, there’s nearly no occasion where the Œ ligature (or diagraph or grapheme) will be use with lower cases
Uppercase Æ is quite common in the Scandinavian languages. Unlike French, Scandinavian languages have no problems starting sentences with nouns (since nouns without articles are often employed, and the definite articles are all suffixes, rather than separate words before the noun they qualify).
In Retskrivningsordbogen (the dictionary that dictates spelling in Danish), there are three pages of words beginning with the letter æ.
there’s nearly no occasion where the Œ ligature (or diagraph or grapheme) will be use with lower cases
It is used for Œdipe (and may thus appear many times in some text on psychology), Œta (a mountain in Greece) and in proper names of foreign people. And I learn from two (non recent) dictionaries of mine (Larouse and Hachette) that one may write either Œrsted or Ørsted.
In my “Petit Larouse illustré”, I count 54 words (that are not proper names) including only one verb, “œuvrer” whose first letter is “œ”. A sentence can start with a verb, for instance “Œuvrer”, “Œuvrons”, “Œuvrez” etc. The article in front of nouns may be elided in titles. So, in a title, you might get “Œcuménisme moderne” and, when the subject gets hot, newspaper titles may beat the statistics!
( Whoopsies—I never did claim to particularly proficient in French gender association :-P )
I have to say I’d far prefer simply Oersted, or even Orsted, to Œrsted. The former two give a clear indication that they are ‘simplified’ spellings for use when Ø is not available; the latter just seems an odd, misplaced Frenchification more likely to cause confusion than anything.
Well, I, as a Dane, am not one to lambast language councils for their sometimes dubitable decisions, considering how the Danish Language Council regularly butchers loan words in Danish in an attempt to make them ‘easier’ for Danes.
I quote, haphazardly, majonæse (for mayonnaise), konjak (for cognac), or risalamande (for ris à l’amande). The last one in particular grinds me, since risalamande is not even any more logical or phonetic in Danish than ris à l’amande.
Oh, that example (Tiptoe) uses Ae-lig, Oe-lig and Ue-lig for Ä, Ö, and Ü, not actually for œ or Œ.
In German typo-/ortho-graphy (alone) it’s acceptable to replace umlaut with a following e; a typographic alternative is to merge those letters (see also: e.g. http://www.liechtensteinmuseum.at/de/pages/home.asp ’s typeface NEUE ÖFFNUNGSZEITEN SEIT 2. MÄRZ 2008 (with Ö and Ä as OE-lig, AE-lig )
It is not acceptable to use a postscript e for umlaut-dots in most other languages (compare: it’s only acceptable to use apostrophe instead of caron for d, l and t in Slovak and Czech, not in any other language).
Still, I understand that Tiptoe was just your _source_ of inspiration. French indeed cries for Titlecase version for that letter :-)
In Norwegian handwriting, æ is very similar to œ. I think most Norwegians don’t even know œ excist. Actually, last saturday Dagbladet accidentally switched æ for œ in a headline.
In handwriting, yes, æ is usually written very similar to œ (or rather, almost exactly like ce in joined-up writing). But I’ve never seen anyone confuse æ with œ in type. A classmate of mine who bought her computer in the US could never figure out how to type æ on her US keyboard layout, so she consistently used œ instead, but even though it was legible, everybody noticed that it looked wrong, and it slowed down reading.
That a newspaper could actually mix them up sounds completely bizarre and absurd to me.
the latter just seems an odd, misplaced Frenchification more likely to cause confusion than anything.
The more I look the more I am puzzled.
I downloaded the two Mozilla French dictionaries from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/browse/type:3. The files have extension .xpi and you just unzip them to get the dictionaries, that are good old-style plain text ISO8859-15 (latin9) encoded files (one word per line); fr-FR.dic (82000 entries) would be the “pre 1990” version and fr.dic (1990 reform, 90 000 entries) would to be the most “modern” one. Instead of utf-8 re-encoding, I just used a unix window (on my mac) with “Window Settings > Display, Character Set Encoding > Western (ISO Latin 9)” and kept the files as is to better see the bugs.
I first looked at all proper names containing “oe” or “œ” in fr-FR.dic. Here is the command (I had to make a screen grab)
and I got on the output the following list (one entry per line):
This proves that in foreign names, even if “oe” is not pronounced as two separate letters, French will use “oe” if necessary, and not “œ”. The entry “Oedipe” looks however erroneous and the fact that Oersted is not written “Œrsted” may unfortunately be explained by... a bug.
Indeed, if I look more carefully at the file fr-FR.dic (if I search for “rsted”), I realize that the character “Œ” was ill encoded; it was encoded twice 0xBE (for “Œrsted” and “Œdipe”) and twice 0x8C (for “d’Œrsted” and “d’Œdipe”), instead of 0xBC. The entries “Oedipe” and “Oersted” might just be... a patch?
If I compare fr-FR.dic with fr.dic, I see that the entry “œrsted” (for the physical unit) has become “oersted”, which seems to be reasonable but, on the other hand, many other “œ” are now “oe” in fr.dic, for unknown reasons. Those I have checked have not changed in the “Petit Robert” dictionary (online). Does anyone know who decided what in 1990? And do you know of more reliable plain text dictionaries?
I have seen handwriting styles where (naturally) a single a is single-storey, but for æ a double-storey-A–E ligature is used.(starting like the bowl of the P, curling back at the bottom to form the A’s bowl and writing an e, looking like antiqua print æ-s, connecting from left at the x-height, on the right at the baseline.
Yes, I normally write æ like that by hand (though the writing style I currently use the most has double-storey a’s, as well). However, it is far less common than the ‘ce’ style, at least in Denmark.
Another style is to actually write œ, which some people also do (I myself used to write æ’s like that previously).
And do you know of more reliable plain text dictionaries?
The OpenOffice dictionaries are plain text and those for French I have looked at don’t suffer from the “Œ” bug. It seems clear that “œrsted” is now “oersted” after the reform on which I could find some information here (in French).
Michel
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4.Apr.2008 2.05pm
I’ve always found this digraph to be as cloying (for me) as the historical ligatures st and ct. They call too much attention to themselves. I suppose for specific settings or maybe artistic settings they are useful though. The second from the left works best for me. The first and last (top line) read as CE to me.
4.Apr.2008 2.16pm
Good point.
People with these digraphs in their alphabet (eg Scandinavian languages) don’t have that “CE” problem, but for English usage of Œ as a ligature, a more “O-ish” left half might be better.
4.Apr.2008 10.05pm
Well, Scandinavian languages don’t use œ (you might be thinking of ø or ö). French is the only prominent modern language I can think of that uses œ, as in your example œuf.
I have no problems with the lowercase œ, but the designs of the uppercase Œ often do bother me, and I sometimes wonder if a form where an O with minimal optical distortion just touches E might work better at least for those who don’t use this grapheme* on a daily basis. But we will also have to consult native French speakers on this one.
* I use digraph to mean a two-letter combination used for writing a single sound, such as th and ng in thing.
4.Apr.2008 10.44pm
Scandinavian languages don’t use œ
Yes, I was thinking of that other digraph Æ, which is used in Scandinavian.
5.Apr.2008 5.29am
I like it. The U&lc more than the small-caps, as the ‘E’ unfortunately is straight on its left, and therefore tends to clog the gap.
How frequent are ‘Æ’ in ‘Œ’ in French, Danish and Norwegian?
This remarkable illustration is taken from a French primer (1967):
Learning the letter ‘e’: An ‘oeuf’ looks like an ‘o’ – but sounds like an ‘e’. (The derivation sequence is a little bit bloated; what exactly happens between 2/3 and 5/6?)
Just wanted to add that, sorry for the digression.
5.Apr.2008 7.01am
I guess the capital digraph OE is more likely to appear in the word “oeuvre”
[at least on the internet]. See the site http://www.cardinalleger.com/
Edit. People may be less careful when writing “oeuf” than “oeuvre” (“Les Oeuvres du Cardinal Léger” becomes “The Endeavors of Cardinal Léger” in English). But there are so many French recipes... Who knows, at least when printed on paper. But don’t forget, there are also “hors d’oeuvres”, that are quite important in French cuisine. And there is also “main d’oeuvre” (manpower).
5.Apr.2008 10.52am
In French, there’s also bœuf (beef), cœur (hearth), manœuvre (operate), chef-d’œuvre (masterpiece), contrecœur (back-plate) and some others…
In any case, there’s nearly no occasion where the Œ ligature (or diagraph or grapheme) will be use with lower cases (the only possibilities are «œuf» or «œuvre» as the first noun of a book title. A sentence couldn’t begin with a common noun. So, mainly, this gliph will be use in an all lower cases or an all upper cases word.
As for reading CE, it’s a matter of habitude, I think. As a French reader, I would never have tought of this but have read OE by recognizing the character and the word instantly.
5.Apr.2008 1.39pm
Just a simple remark : if I type “boeuf” instead of “bœuf” in Word on my sister’s PC, the word is automatically replaced by “bœuf” by the spell checker: if I can manage to get “boeuf” in the text, I get a mistake. Of course, if “œ” is not in the font, the result is a square for the missing character. The same holds for “Œ”.
5.Apr.2008 3.45pm
«How frequent are ‘Æ’ in ‘Œ’ in French, Danish and Norwegian?»
Since œ in French has already been dealt with by native French-speakers, I’ll speak only of æ in Danish and Norwegian (and also in Icelandic and Faeroese—or should that be Færœse? :-P).
Æ is very common in Danish and, unlike in French, it is not thought of as an actual combination of the letters a and e in the minds of the common Dane. Whereas a French person might easily type oeuvre, rather than œuvre, without really considering it ‘un-French’, no Dane would ever type ae, but always æ. The letter is about as common as ä is in German, perhaps slightly less so, since umlauts are more common in German than in Danish. As in German, æ is pronounced as [ɛ] in Danish (and Swedish, where it’s a bit more open).
In Norwegian, æ is less common than in Danish; many words where Danish uses æ (and German and Swedish use ä), Norwegian uses e instead: D æbler, S äpplen, G Äpfeln, but N epler (‘apples’). It’s pronounced [æ] in Norwegian.
In Icelandic and Faeroese, it’s even less common. In Faeroese, where it’s pronounced [æ] as in Norwegian, it’s used in a number of very common words where it’s a very strange development of an old Germanic i or Scandinavian é, such as F mær, tær, I mér, þér, G mir, dir (dative of ‘me, thou’), but apart from that, its usage is similar to Icelandic, where it’s only used as old i-umlauts of Old Norse a and is not that common. In Icelandic, it’s pronounced [ai], a diphthong.
As for the digraphs themselves, I’ve never liked the uppercase Œ, either. In some fonts, they manage to get away with it and make it look sort of harmonic. The Cardinal Léger text above is a good example of that. But most commonly, it just looks like the poor O has had its skin pulled too taut, making it all warped stretched. Not pretty. I’ve never read it as a CE, though. More commonly (due to sheer ingrained habit, I suppose), I’ll instinctively read it as an æ instead, so œufs becomes æufs, which in turn becomes complete nonsense in my head and makes me stumble in reading.
5.Apr.2008 4.08pm
How does one handle the shape of “æ” in a font with a single-story “a”, so as to make the “æ” distinct from “œ”?
5.Apr.2008 4.17pm
One of two things normally happens:
1. The vertical beam of the ɑ is retained, so there’s a vertical stroke between the ɑ and the e, or the curvature of the ɑ is made uneven, so it closes up towards the top right corner, rather than being properly circular (if that explanation makes sense). But they do end up looking rather similar. (Avant Garde uses the former way, fonts like Ayuthara—first one in my list of fonts that applies—do it the second way)
2. The ɑ is replaced by a two-storey a. (Futura does this)
Example:
5.Apr.2008 9.25pm
Nick was your question about the glyphs as a category or the designs you started the thread with? Or both?
6.Apr.2008 1.36am
I should have been more clear: My question wasn’t about the frequency of ‘æ’ and ‘œ’, but ‘Æ’ and ‘Œ’, i.e. uppercase. And the answer given by Alexandre (for French) is as I had expected:
In any case, there’s nearly no occasion where the Œ ligature (or diagraph or grapheme) will be use with lower cases
6.Apr.2008 5.29am
Ah, sorry, I completely misread that.
Uppercase Æ is quite common in the Scandinavian languages. Unlike French, Scandinavian languages have no problems starting sentences with nouns (since nouns without articles are often employed, and the definite articles are all suffixes, rather than separate words before the noun they qualify).
In Retskrivningsordbogen (the dictionary that dictates spelling in Danish), there are three pages of words beginning with the letter æ.
6.Apr.2008 5.44am
there’s nearly no occasion where the Œ ligature (or diagraph or grapheme) will be use with lower cases
It is used for Œdipe (and may thus appear many times in some text on psychology), Œta (a mountain in Greece) and in proper names of foreign people. And I learn from two (non recent) dictionaries of mine (Larouse and Hachette) that one may write either Œrsted or Ørsted.
In my “Petit Larouse illustré”, I count 54 words (that are not proper names) including only one verb, “œuvrer” whose first letter is “œ”. A sentence can start with a verb, for instance “Œuvrer”, “Œuvrons”, “Œuvrez” etc. The article in front of nouns may be elided in titles. So, in a title, you might get “Œcuménisme moderne” and, when the subject gets hot, newspaper titles may beat the statistics!
6.Apr.2008 5.53am
Great information, Janus & Michel, thanks!
6.Apr.2008 5.53am
«And I learn from two (non recent) dictionaries of mine (Larouse and Hachette) that one may write either Œrsted or Ørsted.»
Mon dieu, quel horreur !
6.Apr.2008 6.10am
Mon dieu, quelle horreur !
For those that conclude that their font might now require an “Ø” for use in Canada, that must be a shock indeed.
6.Apr.2008 6.46am
( Whoopsies—I never did claim to particularly proficient in French gender association :-P )
I have to say I’d far prefer simply Oersted, or even Orsted, to Œrsted. The former two give a clear indication that they are ‘simplified’ spellings for use when Ø is not available; the latter just seems an odd, misplaced Frenchification more likely to cause confusion than anything.
6.Apr.2008 7.24am
The “Petit Robert” online leaves no choice for the physical unit (with IPA pronunciation between brackets, as usual):
œrsted [œʀstɛd] nom masculin
Encyclopædia Universalis (online) seems to leave no other choice either for the physicist; they write « ŒRSTED ou ØRSTED HANS CHRISTIAN (1777-1851) ».
I guess the French Academy decided so.
6.Apr.2008 7.50am
«I guess the French Academy decided so.»
Well, I, as a Dane, am not one to lambast language councils for their sometimes dubitable decisions, considering how the Danish Language Council regularly butchers loan words in Danish in an attempt to make them ‘easier’ for Danes.
I quote, haphazardly, majonæse (for mayonnaise), konjak (for cognac), or risalamande (for ris à l’amande). The last one in particular grinds me, since risalamande is not even any more logical or phonetic in Danish than ris à l’amande.
6.Apr.2008 8.58am
I for one will take these glyphs more seriously now.... Thanks!
6.Apr.2008 10.32am
Hm, good point, Nick!
The titlecase version of œ looks very desirable indeed, from a typographic point of view!
(One more idea collected).
6.Apr.2008 11.01am
Eben, I was asking about the phenomenon in general.
I collected the idea from Karsten’s Tiptoe.
6.Apr.2008 11.28am
Oh, that example (Tiptoe) uses Ae-lig, Oe-lig and Ue-lig for Ä, Ö, and Ü, not actually for œ or Œ.
In German typo-/ortho-graphy (alone) it’s acceptable to replace umlaut with a following e; a typographic alternative is to merge those letters (see also: e.g. http://www.liechtensteinmuseum.at/de/pages/home.asp ’s typeface NEUE ÖFFNUNGSZEITEN SEIT 2. MÄRZ 2008 (with Ö and Ä as OE-lig, AE-lig )
It is not acceptable to use a postscript e for umlaut-dots in most other languages (compare: it’s only acceptable to use apostrophe instead of caron for d, l and t in Slovak and Czech, not in any other language).
Still, I understand that Tiptoe was just your _source_ of inspiration. French indeed cries for Titlecase version for that letter :-)
6.Apr.2008 5.28pm
Szabolcs, thanks!
Nick, I can see where you might be inspired. It is really well done isn’t it?
7.Apr.2008 7.33am
In Norwegian handwriting, æ is very similar to œ. I think most Norwegians don’t even know œ excist. Actually, last saturday Dagbladet accidentally switched æ for œ in a headline.
7.Apr.2008 5.39pm
That sounds very odd to me.
In handwriting, yes, æ is usually written very similar to œ (or rather, almost exactly like ce in joined-up writing). But I’ve never seen anyone confuse æ with œ in type. A classmate of mine who bought her computer in the US could never figure out how to type æ on her US keyboard layout, so she consistently used œ instead, but even though it was legible, everybody noticed that it looked wrong, and it slowed down reading.
That a newspaper could actually mix them up sounds completely bizarre and absurd to me.
7.Apr.2008 6.29pm
the latter just seems an odd, misplaced Frenchification more likely to cause confusion than anything.
The more I look the more I am puzzled.
I downloaded the two Mozilla French dictionaries from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/browse/type:3. The files have extension .xpi and you just unzip them to get the dictionaries, that are good old-style plain text ISO8859-15 (latin9) encoded files (one word per line); fr-FR.dic (82000 entries) would be the “pre 1990” version and fr.dic (1990 reform, 90 000 entries) would to be the most “modern” one. Instead of utf-8 re-encoding, I just used a unix window (on my mac) with “Window Settings > Display, Character Set Encoding > Western (ISO Latin 9)” and kept the files as is to better see the bugs.
I first looked at all proper names containing “oe” or “œ” in fr-FR.dic. Here is the command (I had to make a screen grab)
and I got on the output the following list (one entry per line):
Coelho, Defoe, Goethe, Groenland, Hoegaerden, Hoeilaart, Koekelberg, Loewner, Noether, Oedipe/LM, OEM, Oersted/M, Piedbœuf, Schoenberg, Toeplitz, Westhoek.
This proves that in foreign names, even if “oe” is not pronounced as two separate letters, French will use “oe” if necessary, and not “œ”. The entry “Oedipe” looks however erroneous and the fact that Oersted is not written “Œrsted” may unfortunately be explained by... a bug.
Indeed, if I look more carefully at the file fr-FR.dic (if I search for “rsted”), I realize that the character “Œ” was ill encoded; it was encoded twice 0xBE (for “Œrsted” and “Œdipe”) and twice 0x8C (for “d’Œrsted” and “d’Œdipe”), instead of 0xBC. The entries “Oedipe” and “Oersted” might just be... a patch?
If I compare fr-FR.dic with fr.dic, I see that the entry “œrsted” (for the physical unit) has become “oersted”, which seems to be reasonable but, on the other hand, many other “œ” are now “oe” in fr.dic, for unknown reasons. Those I have checked have not changed in the “Petit Robert” dictionary (online). Does anyone know who decided what in 1990? And do you know of more reliable plain text dictionaries?
Michel
8.Apr.2008 1.35am
I have seen handwriting styles where (naturally) a single a is single-storey, but for æ a double-storey-A–E ligature is used.(starting like the bowl of the P, curling back at the bottom to form the A’s bowl and writing an e, looking like antiqua print æ-s, connecting from left at the x-height, on the right at the baseline.
8.Apr.2008 5.39am
Yes, I normally write æ like that by hand (though the writing style I currently use the most has double-storey a’s, as well). However, it is far less common than the ‘ce’ style, at least in Denmark.
Another style is to actually write œ, which some people also do (I myself used to write æ’s like that previously).
8.Apr.2008 8.34am
And do you know of more reliable plain text dictionaries?
The OpenOffice dictionaries are plain text and those for French I have looked at don’t suffer from the “Œ” bug. It seems clear that “œrsted” is now “oersted” after the reform on which I could find some information here (in French).
Michel