D

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The letter D is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is dee Template:IPA.

Contents

History

Egyptian hieroglyph "door" Proto-Semitic D Phoenician D Etruscan D Greek Delta
<hiero>O31</hiero> Image:Proto-semiticD-01.pngImage:Proto-semiticD-02.png Image:PhoenicianD-01.png Image:EtruscanD-01.png Image:GreekD-01.png


The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that this might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter was pronounced /d/; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous, but still maintained (see letter B). Greek letter: Δ (capital) or δ (small) (Delta).

The minuscule (lower-case) form of D, consisting of a loop and a tall vertical stroke, developed by gradual variations on the majuscule (capital) form. In handwriting it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif was extended while the rest of the letter was reduced, resulting in an angled stroke and loop. The angled stroke then developed into a vertical stroke.

Usage

The letter D generally takes the voiced alveolar plosive value, IPA Template:IPA in most languages that use the Roman alphabet, including English. Exceptions to this include Vietnamese, where it represents a voiced alveolar fricative (/z/) or a palatal approximant (/j/), similar to the English letters z or y (the letter đ is used for the sound similar to the English d). In Welsh d when doubled (dd) has the value Template:IPA, like English th in this.

Digraphs of D are rare in English, although other languages use DH or DD for a voiced dental fricative (some Celtic languages) or an aspirated voiced dental plosive (some Indo-Aryan languages), or use affricates DZ, DV, or DZH.

In Cantonese, the sound Template:IPA means a little bit, from the ancient use of the character 的 (in the phrase "兀的") in Chinese written language. Since 的 is no longer used in this way, Hong Kong residents invented a new character 啲 (which is not supported in many Chinese systems), or simply write D instead.

Codes for computing

{{Letter |NATO=Delta |Morse=–·· |Character=D4 |Braille=⠙ }} In Unicode the capital D is codepoint U+0044 and the lowercase d is U+0064.

The ASCII code for capital D is 68 and for lowercase d is 100; or in binary 01000100 and 01100100, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital D is 196 and for lowercase d is 132.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "&#68;" and "&#100;" for upper and lower case respectively.

Meanings

Science & Math

Others

See also

Template:AZsubnavals:D bs:D ca:D sn:D cs:D da:D de:D el:D es:D eo:D fr:D gl:D ko:D hr:D io:D id:D it:D he:D kw:D la:D hu:D nl:D ja:D no:D nn:D pt:D ro:D scn:D simple:D sl:D fi:D sv:D tl:D vi:D tr:D yo:D zh:D