De (Д д; italic: ''Д д'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

. It commonly represents the

voiced dental stop The voiced alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosiv ...

, like the pronunciation of in " door", except closer to the teeth. De is usually Romanized using the Latin letter D.

History

The Cyrillic letter De was derived from the

Greek letter Delta Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

(Δ δ). In the

Early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is an alphabetic writing system that was developed in Medieval Bulgaria in the Preslav Literary School during the late 9th century. It is used to write the Chur ...

its name was (''dobro''), meaning "good". In the

Cyrillic numeral system Cyrillic numerals are a numeral system derived from the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the late 10th century. It was used in the First Bulgarian Empire and by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in R ...

, De had a value of 4.

Form

The major graphic difference between De and its modern Greek equivalent lies in the two

descender In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a grapheme that extends below the Baseline (typography), baseline of a typeface, font. For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal li ...

s ("feet") below the lower corners of the Cyrillic letter. The descenders were borrowed from a Byzantine

uncial Uncial is a majuscule script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Uncial letters were used to write Greek and Latin, as well as Gothic, and are the current style for ...

shape of uppercase Delta. De, like the Cyrillic letter El, has two

typographical Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spac ...

variants: an older variant where its top is pointed (like Delta), and a modern one (first used in mid-19th-century fonts) where it is square. Nowadays, almost all books and magazines are printed with fonts with the second variant of the letter; the first one is rather stylish and only a few popular text fonts use it (the best known example is "Baltika" designed in 1951-52 by V. G. Chiminova and others). In italic (Russian) type, the lowercase form looks more like the lowercase Latin , a mirrored numeral 6 or a partial derivative symbol . Southern (Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian) typography may prefer a variant that looks like a single-storey lowercase Latin . Cursive lowercase De has the same two shapes, but with a different distribution: for example, the ''g''-shaped variant is a standard for schools in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus but also used for certain typefaces with OpenType features. The (Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian-Bulgarian) cursive form of capital De looks like Latin D as the printed version is not comfortable enough to be written quickly. The Serbian cursive form is closer to the shape of a numeral "2" (identical to the form sometimes used for uppercase cursive Latin Q); this form is unknown in Russia.

Usage

It most often represents the

voiced dental plosive The voiced alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic s ...

. However, word-finally and before voiceless consonants, it represents a voiceless . Before a palatalizing vowel, it represents .

Related letters and other similar characters

*Δ δ :

*D d : Latin letter D *Л л : Cyrillic letter El *Ԁ ԁ : Cyrillic letter Komi De *G g : Latin letter G * ∂ : Partial derivative symbol * 𐍓 :

Computing codes

References

External links

* * {{Authority control Cyrillic letters