Eth ( ,

uppercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''#Majuscule, majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally ''#Minuscule, minuscule'') in the written representation of certain langua ...

: ⟨Ð⟩,

lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...

: ⟨ð⟩; also spelled edh or eð), known as in

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

, is a letter used in Old English,

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English pe ...

, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called ), and Elfdalian. It was also used in

Scandinavia Scandinavia is a subregion#Europe, subregion of northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between its constituent peoples. ''Scandinavia'' most commonly refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It can sometimes also ...

during the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

, but was subsequently replaced with , and later . It is often

transliterated Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...

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

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

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 Sibilants (from 'hissing') are fricative and affricate consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English w ...

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

, 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 based on , was always silent, and was introduced for etymological reasons.

Old English

In Old English, (called ') was used interchangeably with to represent the Old English dental

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

or its

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

, which exist in modern English as the

voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...

and

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refe ...

dental fricatives both now spelled . Unlike the runic letter , is a modified Roman letter. Neither nor was found in the earliest records of

. A study of

Mercia Mercia (, was one of the principal kingdoms founded at the end of Sub-Roman Britain; the area was settled by Anglo-Saxons in an era called the Heptarchy. It was centred on the River Trent and its tributaries, in a region now known as the Midlan ...

n 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

period. in turn went obsolete by the

Early Modern English Early Modern English (sometimes abbreviated EModEFor example, or EMnE) or Early New English (ENE) is the stage of the English language from the beginning of the Tudor period to the English Interregnum and Restoration, or from the transit ...

period, mostly due to the rise of the

printing press A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a printing, print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in whi ...

, 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

. * (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 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 ...

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

External links

* * . {{History of English Faroese language Gaulish language Icelandic language Middle English Old English D D stroke D stroke D English th