ѳ

ѳ (Cyrillic Small Letter Fita, U+0473) is an archaic letter of the Cyrillic script. Visually, it resembles a lowercase 'o' with a horizontal bar passing through its center. Its primary purpose was to transcribe the Greek letter theta (θ), and it represented a voiceless dental fricative /θ/ in early Church Slavonic, evolving to represent /f/ in most contexts in Russian. Fita was historically used in words of Greek origin, such as "orthography" (орѳографія) and "theater" (ѳеатръ), differentiating them from words using `Ф` (Ef), which represented /f/ from other sources or simply a different historical sound. It was officially removed from the Russian alphabet during the 1918 orthographic reform and is now primarily encountered in historical texts, Old Church Slavonic, or specialized liturgical contexts. Its uppercase counterpart is `Ө` (Cyrillic Capital Letter Fita, U+0472).