old english font letter d old english alphabet lowercase

Under King Alfred the Great, ⟨þ⟩ grew greatly in popularity and started to overtake ⟨ð⟩. Another source indicates that the letter is 'derived from Irish writing'. A study of Mercian royal diplomas found that ⟨ð⟩ (along with ⟨ đ⟩) began to emerge in the early 8th century, with ⟨ð⟩ becoming strongly preferred by the 780s. Neither ⟨ð⟩ nor ⟨þ⟩ was found in the earliest records of Old English. Unlike the runic letter ⟨ þ⟩, ⟨ð⟩ is a modified Roman letter. In Old English, ⟨ð⟩ (called ðæt) was used interchangeably with ⟨ þ⟩ to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme / θ/ or its allophone / ð/, which exist in modern English phonology as the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives both now spelled ⟨ th⟩. The lowercase version has been adopted to represent a voiced dental fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with ⟨ dh⟩, and later ⟨ d⟩. Eth ( / ɛ ð/, uppercase: Ð, lowercase: ð also spelled edh or eð), known as ðæt in Old English, is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), Khmer and Elfdalian.

Old english font letter d old english alphabet lowercase