superior letter
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In
typography Typography is the art and technique of Typesetting, arranging type to make written language legibility, legible, readability, readable and beauty, appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, Point (typogra ...
and handwriting, a superior letter is a lower-case letter placed above the baseline and made smaller than an ordinary script. The style has traditionally been distinct from
superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, wh ...
. Formerly quite common in abbreviations, the original purpose was to make handwritten abbreviations clearly distinct from normal words. These could also be used to make the important words on signs larger. In technical terms, the superior letter can also be called the superscripted minuscule letter. In modern usage, with word processors and text entry interfaces,
superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, wh ...
and superior letters are produced in the same way and look identical. Their distinction would refer to their usage and not to their form. With the advent of
printing Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ...
, pieces of type were cast to enable them to appear in print. These are still commonly used in French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, though their appearance in English has diminished. Not every letter in the alphabet has a piece of type cast for it as a superior letter. In the book ''Thinking in Type'', by Alex W. White, it is stated that there are only twelve superior letters used in French and Spanish: ''a, b, d, e, i, l, m, n, o, r, s,'' and ''t''. However, a few other superior letters are also used in those languages, for example in English, ''h'' is also sometimes rendered as a superior letter, or in French, superior ''g'' is used in some abbreviations (''See below'').


Use in French

In French, certain abbreviations are written with the first letter(s) of the word they represent, followed by the final letter(s) in superscript. The superscript in this case is sometimes optional. Most commonly, this appears in the abbreviations of personal titles: ''Mgr'' (or ''Mgr'') stands for ('Your Grace'), ''Mlle'' (or ''Mlle'') for ('Miss'), ''Me'' for ('Maestro'), etc. Other abbreviations containing superior letters are ''mdise'' for ('merchandise'), ''échce'' for ('due date'), and ''Mo'' for ('subway'). When ordinal numbers are abbreviated, superscript letters are generally used: * : ''1er'' ('first') * : ''XXe'' ('twentieth century') * : ''400e'' ('four hundredth') * : ''Nième'' ('nth')


Use in Spanish

In Spanish, they are known as ('flying letters', in Spain) or ( letters). At present, these letters are usually not underlined, though underlining them is acceptable. It is ruled that a period must be added immediately before them, despite the fact that this norm is often ignored. Superior letters are used to shorten various words in order to save space: ''f.o'' ( 'page'); titles: ''D.a'' ( 'Lady, Ms.'); personal compound given names: ''M.a Cristina'' () and regular administrative expressions: ''imp.to'' ( 'tax'). For singular ordinal numbers, shortened forms use the feminine () and masculine () ordinal indicators, rather than the superscript a and o, except in ordinal numbers ending in ''-er'' (only before masculine singular sustantives for ordinal numbers whose cardinal equivalent finishes in ''1'' and ''3'', except with the ''11.º'' variant spelled ). *: ''1.ª'', : ''1.º'', : ''1.er'' ('first') *: ''2.ª'', : ''2.º'', : ''2.do'' ('second') *: ''3.ª'', : ''3.º'', : ''3.er'' ('third') *: ''21.ª'', : ''21.º'', : ''21.er'' ('twenty-first') *: ''25.ª'', : ''25.º'' ('twenty-fifth') For plural ordinal numbers, shortened forms use the superscript as and os: *: ''1.as'', : ''1.os'' ('firsts') *: ''2.as'', : ''2.os'' ('seconds') *: ''3.as'', : ''3.os'' ('thirds') *: ''25.as'' , : ''25.os'' ('twenty-fifths')


Use in English

In English, superior letters are reserved for use with ordinal numerals, as in , etc. However, this use is not mandatory and not always preferred: ''1st'', ''2nd'', ''3rd'', etc. are also accepted abbreviations of ordinal numerals. Previously, in English-speaking countries, abbreviations of given names were used for recordkeeping. Today, their use is very uncommon, and they are generally only found in historical records. These abbreviations sometimes employed superior letters; for example, Alexr for Alexander, Nics for Nicholas.


Masculine and feminine ordinal indicators

Most
typewriter A typewriter is a Machine, mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of Button (control), keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an i ...
s for Spanish and other Romance languages had keys that could enter o and a directly, as a shorthand intended to be used primarily with ordinal numbers, such as 1.o for first. In computing, early 8-bit
character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical values that make up a c ...
s as
code page 437 Code page 437 ( CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or MS-DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (di ...
for the original
IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the List of IBM Personal Computer models, IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on ...
(circa 1981) also had these characters. In
ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology—8-bit computing, 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character (computing), character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character enc ...
Latin-1, and later in
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 ...
, they were assigned to and are known as U+00AA FEMININE ORDINAL INDICATOR (ª) and U+00BA MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR (º). Here, "feminine" and "masculine" refers to
grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...
. In Spanish, Portuguese, Galician and Italian, gender is usually distinguished by the suffixes ''-a'' and ''-o''. These ordinal indicators are now distinct from the superior o and a characters. Apart from
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
’s
Calibri Calibri () is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style. It was designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 2002–2004 and released to the general public in 2006, with Windows Vista. In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Time ...
or Cambria, in most of the commonly available
computer font A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for printi ...
s today, ordinal indicators are not underlined.


Numero sign

One abbreviation using a superior letter, the ''numero'' sign, has been given its own character: №. Originally, this was just another use of a superior o, abbreviating ''numero'', the word for 'number' in several
Romance language The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...
s. It often appears in English, for example in № 2 pencil, for 'number-two pencil'. In
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 ...
, it is assigned to character U+2116 NUMERO SIGN (№) within the Letterlike Symbols block.


Phonetic transcription

Several superior letters are used in phonetic transcription systems. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses the superscript n ⁿ for nasal release, the superscript w ʷ to indicate labialized or labio-velarized consonants, the superscript h ʰ for aspirated consonants, the superscript j ʲ for palatalized consonants, the superscript gamma ᵞ for velarized consonants, the superscript turned h ᶣ for labio-palatalized consonants, the superscript reversed glottal stop for pharyngealized consonants, the superscript glottal stop is used for glottalized but pulmonic sonorants, such as ˀ ˀ ˀ ˀ Other superscript letters are used as an alternative way to represent double articulated consonants, for example ˢfor ͡s


See also

*
Subscript and superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, wh ...
*
Unicode subscripts and superscripts Unicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using a ...
* Ordinal indicator *
Numero sign The numero sign or numero symbol, (also represented as Nº, No̱, No., or no.), is a Typography, typographic abbreviation of the word ''number''(''s'') indicating Ordinal numeral, ordinal numeration, especially in names and titles. For example ...
*
Degree sign The degree symbol or degree sign, , is a glyph or symbol that is used, among other things, to represent degrees of arc (e.g. in geographic coordinate systems), hours (in the medical field), degrees of temperature or alcohol proof. The symbol ...


References

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