The r rotunda ⟨ ꝛ ⟩, "rounded r", is a historical calligraphic variant of the minuscule (lowercase) letter Latin '' r'' used in full script-like typefaces, especially

blackletter Blackletter (sometimes black letter or black-letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for ...

s. Unlike other letter variants such as "

long s The long s, , also known as the medial ''s'' or initial ''s'', is an Archaism, archaic form of the lowercase letter , found mostly in works from the late 8th to early 19th centuries. It replaced one or both of the letters ''s'' in a double-''s ...

" which originally were orthographically distinctive, ''r rotunda'' has always been a calligraphic variant, used when the letter followed a letter with a rounded stroke towards the right side, such as , , , (and in typefaces such as

Fraktur Fraktur () is a calligraphic hand of the Latin alphabet and any of several blackletter typefaces derived from this hand. It is designed such that the beginnings and ends of the individual strokes that make up each letter will be clearly vis ...

where this letter has no vertical stroke, and appears similar to ). In this way, it is comparable to numerous other special types used for ligatures or conjoined letters in early modern typesetting.

Form

This symbol came in several different shapes, all of which were of

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...

. The shape of the letter used in

scripts

Textualis Blackletter (sometimes black letter or black-letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule or Gothic type, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for ...

as well as Rotunda is reminiscent of "half an r", namely, the right side of the Roman capital ; it also looks similar to an

Arabic numeral The ten Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are the most commonly used symbols for writing numbers. The term often also implies a positional notation number with a decimal base, in particular when contrasted with Roman numerals. ...

. Like minuscules in general, this shape for r originated in the style of

cursive Cursive (also known as joined-up writing) is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionality and m ...

writing that was common during the medieval period, which ultimately derived from scribal practice during

Late Antiquity Late antiquity marks the period that comes after the end of classical antiquity and stretches into the onset of the Early Middle Ages. Late antiquity as a period was popularized by Peter Brown (historian), Peter Brown in 1971, and this periodiza ...

. The ''r rotunda'' shape of cursive resembling the numeral is also found in a number of medieval

scribal abbreviation Scribal abbreviations, or sigla (grammatical number, singular: siglum), are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek language, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern Textua ...

s containing , for example in the signs for the Latin word-final syllables ''ram'', ''-orum'' and ''-arum''. There are several variant forms for the ''r rotunda'' glyph. A very narrow second variant is found in some Textura manuscripts, in the form of one solid diamond atop another atop a vertical stroke. Another form found in German typefaces is a variant of that previous, with something like part of an resembling an

integral sign The integral symbol (''see below'') is used to denote integrals and antiderivatives in mathematics, especially in calculus. History The notation was introduced by the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1675 in his private w ...

atop something rather like a . It can be found used as the second of a pair and after . A fifth form, used in the 18th century in some French

italic type In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography. Owing to the influence f ...

faces, was a derivative either of the Schrift form of the minuscule or of similar typefaces used elsewhere. Its form was of a backwards set just after the same shape rotated 180 degrees. They were separated by a space smaller than their stroke width, and the whole character was slanted as though it were cursive. As this typeface has the whose ascender curves to the left (giving it a rounded right side), it was used after that character as well. By then, though, the character was the same width as a regular , so it was maintained because it appeared to its users to have some elegance or to remind them of prestigious old calligraphy.

Use for Tironian ''et''

The abbreviation etc. was typeset using the Tironian ''et'' , as in early

incunable An incunable or incunabulum (: incunables or incunabula, respectively) is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. The specific date is essentially arbitrary, but the ...

s. Later, when typesets no longer contained a sort for the Tironian ''et'', it became common practice to use the ''r rotunda'' glyph instead, setting for ''etc.''

Demise

Use of this form of r was never widespread except in blackletter scripts, so it fell out of use in English in the 16th century as roman scripts became predominant. Some modern

scripts use a letter that has a resemblance to the r rotunda.

Encoding

In Unicode, the character is encoded as and The letter was added to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

in 2005, in the

Latin Extended-D Latin Extended-D is a Unicode block containing Latin (script), Latin characters for phonetic, Mayanist, and Medieval transcription and notation systems. 89 of the characters in this block are for medieval characters proposed by the Medieval Unic ...

block. It is included in Unicode 5.1 in both lower case and upper case forms, although there seems to be no real evidence for the historical existence of a capital version and a normal capital ''R'' seems to have been used instead. Before that, the

Medieval Unicode Font Initiative In digital typography, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) is a project which aims to coordinate the encoding and display of special characters in medieval texts written in the Latin alphabet or in runes, which are not otherwise encoded ...

(MUFI) had allocated it in the

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearly covering ...

(PUA) of medievalist fonts at U+F20E and U+F22D. Since the characters are now available in Unicode, MUFI recommends that the Unicode code points be used, not the PUA code points. Some fonts treat the glyph as a mere stylistic variant of and may make it available by smart font features, e.g. Open Type 'hist', 'hlig', 'calt', 'salt' or 'ss**'.

also has characters for medieval

s. Among them is the abbreviation for the syllable ''rum'', consisting of a ''r rotunda'' with a cut, resulting in a shape very similar to the

astrological symbol Historically, astrological and astronomical symbols have overlapped. Frequently used symbols include signs of the zodiac and classical planets. These originate from medieval Byzantine codices. Their current form is a product of the European Rena ...

Form

Use for Tironian ''et''

Demise

Encoding

Gallery

See also

References

External links