Ð (minuscule: ð), known as eth or edh, is a Latin-script letter. It is present in the Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called ), and Elfdalian alphabets.

It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with , and later .

It is often transliterated as .

The lowercase version has been adopted to represent a voiced dental fricative (IPA: ) in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Faroese In Faroese, is not assigned to any particular phoneme and appears mostly for etymological reasons, but it indicates most glides. When appears before , it is in a few words pronounced . In the Faroese alphabet, follows .

Khmer is sometimes used in Khmer romanization to represent .

Icelandic

In Icelandic, , called "eð", represents an alveolar non-sibilant fricative, voiced intervocalically and word-finally, and voiceless otherwise. In the Icelandic alphabet, follows .

Norwegian In Olav Jakobsen Høyem's version of based on , was always silent, and was introduced for etymological reasons.

Old English In Old English, was used interchangeably with to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme or its allophone , which exist in modern English as the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives both now spelled .

Scholars disagree on what the Anglo-Saxons would have called this letter. Fred Robison argues that BM M.S. Stowe 57 provides ðæt as the native Old English letter name. Vincent P. McCarren and Robert N. Mory, however, write that it "seems equally likely that [...] the ð was intended as an abbreviation for the word ðaet rather than the name of the letter."

Unlike the runic letter , is a modified Roman letter. Neither nor was found in the earliest records of Old English. A study of Mercian royal diplomas found that began to emerge in the early 8th century, with becoming strongly preferred by the 780s. Another source indicates that the letter is "derived from Irish writing".

Under the reign of King Alfred the Great, grew greatly in popularity and started to overtake , and did so completely by the Middle English period. in turn went obsolete by the Early Modern English period, mostly due to the rise of the printing press, and was replaced by the digraph .

Welsh has also been used by some in written Welsh to represent , which is normally represented as ..

Phonetic transcription (U+00F0) represents a voiced dental fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet. (U+1D9E) is used in phonetic transcription. ᴆ (U+1D06) is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.

Computer encoding

Upper and lower case forms of eth have Unicode encodings:

These Unicode codepoints were inherited from ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin-1") encoding.

Modern uses A capital eth is used as the currency symbol for Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency.

See also

D

T

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

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