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Two categories of consonant letters are defined in Odia: the structured consonants (Odia: ବର୍ଗ୍ୟ ବ୍ୟଞ୍ଜନ, romanized: bargya byan̄jana) and the unstructured consonants (ଅବର୍ଗ୍ୟ ବ୍ୟଞ୍ଜନ, abargya byan̄jana).

The structured consonants are classified according to their place of articulation, that is, where the tongue touches the palate.

In the first standardised Odia alphabet book, Barnabodha was compiled by Madhusudan Rao in 1895, the phonemes ba, va and wa were represented by the same letter ବ, with the sounds va and wa. This was because the phonemes ba and va had merged in the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages. The phoneme wa could be written through the consonant ligature symbol ୍ୱ, which it shared with ba. Gopala Chandra Praharaj, who compiled and published the first comprehensive Odia dictionary, Purnachandra Odia Bhashakosha (1931–40), introduced a new letter ୱ to the script to represent the sound wa.^[10][11][12] An alternate letter was created for wa, ଵ, but it has not gained wide acceptance.

Odia is an alphasyllabic alphabet or an abugida

There is no significant difference in the pronunciation of long and short vowels.

A different form of ଇ is used with the consonants ଖ (kha), ଥ (tha), ଧ (dha). This diacritic is a remnant from the Odia cursive style variant Karani script.

There is a set of four vocalics, each with an independent form and vowel diacritic, but only one, ଋ is used in modern Odia. ୠ, ଌ, ୡ and their diacritics are only used for Sanskrit transcription, so they are not always included in the Odia alphabet.

The anusvara and candrabindu diacritics are used to indicate nasalisation. A visarga adds a post-vocalic voiceless glottal fricative ḥ to the end of a syllable.

The following is a sample text in Odia of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights