Eth

Quality 0.50 · 6 views · Updated 2 months ago

Letter of the Latin alphabet; used in Icelandic, Faroese, and Old English

title: "Eth" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["faroese-language", "gaulish-language", "icelandic-language", "middle-english", "old-english", "old-norse", "palaeographic-letters", "phonetic-transcription-symbols", "latin-script-letters", "english-th"] description: "Letter of the Latin alphabet; used in Icelandic, Faroese, and Old English" topic_path: "general/faroese-language" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Letter of the Latin alphabet; used in Icelandic, Faroese, and Old English ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox grapheme"]

Field	Value
name	Ð
letter	Ð ð
image	File:Latin letter eth.svg
imageclass	skin-invert-image
imagesize	200px
imagealt	Writing cursive forms of Ð
script	Latin script
type	Alphabet
typedesc	ic and logographic
language	Old English
Old Norse
phonemes	[]
[]
[]

| | unicode | U+00D0, U+00F0 | | fam1 | K1K2O31 | | fam2 | [[Image:Proto-semiticD-02.svg|class=skin-invert-image|20px|Dalet]] | | fam3 | [[File:PhoenicianD-01.png|class=skin-invert-image|20px|Early Phoenician Dalet]] | | fam4 | [[Image:Phoenician daleth.svg|class=skin-invert-image|20px|Dalet]] | | fam5 | Δ δ | | fam6 | 𐌃 | | fam7 | D d | | fam8 | Ꝺ ꝺ | | usageperiod | ~800 to present | | sisters | None | | equivalents | d | | associates | th, dh | | direction | Left-to-Right | ::

|unicode=U+00D0, U+00F0 |alphanumber= |number= |fam1=K1K2O31 |fam2=[[Image:Proto-semiticD-02.svg|class=skin-invert-image|20px|Dalet]] |fam3=[[File:PhoenicianD-01.png|class=skin-invert-image|20px|Early Phoenician Dalet]] |fam4=[[Image:Phoenician daleth.svg|class=skin-invert-image|20px|Dalet]] |fam5=Δ δ |fam6=𐌃 |fam7=D d |fam8=Ꝺ ꝺ |usageperiod=~800 to present |sisters=None |equivalents=d |associates=th, dh |direction=Left-to-Right ::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Latin_letter_Ð.svg" caption="Eth in [[Arial]] and [[Times New Roman" alt="Lower case and upper case of Eth ({{angbr"] ::

Eth ( , uppercase: ⟨Ð⟩, lowercase: ⟨ð⟩; also spelled edh or eð), known as ðæt (that) in Old English, is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), 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 ឍ km.

Icelandic

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Icelandic_handwriting.JPG" caption="því]]}}''." alt="Photo of black handwritten text on a seemingly yellow paper with the top and bottom blurry and vertical middle clear"] ::

In Icelandic, , called "eð", represents an alveolar non-sibilant fricative, voiced intervocalically and word-finally, and voiceless otherwise, which form one phoneme, . Generally, is represented by thorn at the beginning of words and by elsewhere. The in the name of the letter is devoiced in the nominative and accusative cases: . In the Icelandic alphabet, follows .

Norwegian

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

Old English

In Old English, (called ðæt (that)) 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 .

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.

References

Marsden, Richard. (2004). "The Cambridge Old English Reader". [[Cambridge University Press]].
Shaw, Philip. (2013). "Adapting the Roman alphabet for writing Old English: evidence from coin epigraphy and single-sheet charters". [[Early Medieval Europe (journal).
Freeborn, Dennis. (1992). "From Old English to Standard English". Macmillan.
Hill, Will. (30 June 2020). "The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System". Taylor & Francis.
"Testament Newydd (1567)".
Constable, Peter. (2004-04-19). "L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS".
(2002-03-20). "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::