Control of glycoside bond stereochemistry is the central challenge in the synthesis of oligosaccharides. 2-Deoxyglycosides, which lack a C2 substituent to guide stereoselectivity, are among the most difficult classes of glycoside bond constructions. Here we present a method to synthesize 2-deoxysaccharides with specified glycoside bond stereochemistry using a nucleophilic carbohydrate residue and the synthetic equivalent of an alcohol electrophile.Because the configuration of the nucleophile can be precisely controlled, both αand βglycosides can be synthesized from the same starting material in nearly all cases examined.Stereoselectivities in these reactions are often greater than 50:1 and yields typically exceed 70%.This strategy is amenable to the stereocontrolled syntheses of trisaccharide diastereomers, and a tetrasaccharide. Our method offers a fundamentally new approach to O-glycoside synthesis to enable downstream biochemical and natural product applications.