A bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...

. It may be used as a

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

to derive new letters from old ones, or simply as an addition to make a grapheme more distinct from others. It can take the form of a vertical bar, slash, or crossbar. A stroke is sometimes drawn through the numerals 7 (horizontal overbar) and 0 (overstruck foreslash), to make them more distinguishable from the number 1 and the letter O, respectively. (In some

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

s, one or other or both of these characters are designed in these styles; they are not produced by

overstrike In typography, overstrike is a method of printing characters that are missing from the printer's character set. The character is created by placing one character on another one – for example, overstriking ⟨L⟩ with ⟨-⟩ results in prin ...

or by

combining diacritic In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode al ...

. The normal way in most of Europe to write the number seven is with a bar. ) In medieval English

scribal abbreviations Scribal abbreviations, or sigla (singular: siglum), are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern manuscript editing (substantive and mecha ...

, a stroke or bar was used to indicate abbreviation. For example, , the

pound sign The pound sign () is the currency symbol, symbol for the pound unit of account, unit of Pound sterling, sterling – the currency of the United Kingdom and its associated Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories and previously of Kin ...

, is a stylised form of the letter (the letter with a cross bar). For the specific usages of various letters with bars and strokes, see their individual articles.

Letters with bar

Currency signs with bar

Currency symbols and letters with double bar

Notes

References

External links