De (Cyrillic)

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Cyrillic letter De
Ꙕ		Ю̂			Ꙗ
Я̈	Я̂	Я̨	Ԙ	Ѥ	Ѧ	Ꙙ	Ѫ
Ꙛ	Ѩ	Ꙝ	Ѭ	Ѯ	Ѱ	Ѳ	Ѵ
Ѷ	Ꙟ

• List of Cyrillic letters
• List of Cyrillic multigraphs

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

/d̪/, like the pronunciation of ⟨d⟩ in "door", except closer to the teeth. De is usually romanised using the Latin letter D.

History

The Cyrillic letter De was derived from the Greek letter Delta (Δ δ).

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was добро (dobro), meaning "good".

In the Cyrillic numeral system, De had a value of 4.

Form

Elizaveta Bem's alphabet book

The major graphic difference between De and its modern Greek equivalent lies in the two descenders ("feet") below the lower corners of the Cyrillic letter. The descenders were borrowed from a Byzantine uncial shape of uppercase Delta.

De, like the Cyrillic letter El, has two typographical 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 ⟨d⟩, 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 ⟨g⟩. Cursive lowercase De has the same two shapes, but with a different distribution: for example, the g-shaped variant is a standard for Russian schools.^[1]

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

vowel, it represents /dʲ/.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Δ δ : Greek letter Delta
• D d : Latin letter D
• Л л : Cyrillic letter El
• Ԁ ԁ : Cyrillic letter Komi De
• G g : Latin letter G
• ∂  : Partial derivative symbol

Computing codes

Character information

Preview	Д		д		ᲁ
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER DE		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER DE		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER LONG-LEGGED DE
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	1044	U+0414	1076	U+0434	7297	U+1C81
UTF-8	208 148	D0 94	208 180	D0 B4	225 178 129	E1 B2 81
Numeric character reference	Д	Д	д	д	ᲁ	ᲁ
Named character reference	Д		д
KOI8-R and KOI8-U	228	E4	196	C4
Code page 855	167	A7	166	A6
Windows-1251	196	C4	228	E4
ISO-8859-5	180	B4	212	D4
Macintosh Cyrillic	132	84	228	E4

References

External links

• The dictionary definition of Д at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of д at Wiktionary