De (Cyrillic)

De (Cyrillic)

De (Д, д) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. It represents /d/ a voiced dental plosive except word-finally and before voiceless consonants, when it represents a voiceless [t] and before any palatalizing vowel, when it represents /dʲ/.

It arose from the Greek letter delta; the major graphic difference with its Greek equivalent lies in the two "feet" below the lower corners of Greek letter delta. Like El, it has two typographical variants: one where its top is square, and one where it is pointed (like delta).

The handwritten form of capital letter De appears like Latin D as the printed version shown here is not comfortable enough to be written quickly. The handwritten lowercase letter looks a bit like a Latin g and it is joined to a following letter by its tail. In cursive type, the lowercase form looks more like the lowercase Latin d: Д, д.

Other Uses

It is used in the title of the movie Borat also with the letter я, though incorrectly, where it replaces the A in the word, printed as "Boядt". In Cyrillic, this would actually be pronounced like "Voyadt". This is probably because the letter looks "foreign" to most of the English speaking world. This is an instance of faux Cyrillic.

It also makes up the mouth of the character Giko Cat in Shift-JIS text art, commonly seen on the Japanese internet forum 2channel.

The lowercase cursive character д is also used in partial differential notation.

Encoding

The following table lists the different methods for encoding the character electronically, in both its majuscule (capital) and minuscule (small) forms.

Template:Ref 1—The values represent Unicode code points. The binary values would be equivalent to UTF-16 big endian.