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D

D (named dee ^[1]) is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to denote 500 in Roman numerals

History
Usage
Related letters and other similar characters
Computing codes
Other representations
See also
References
External links

History

Egyptian hieroglyph door	Phoenician daleth	Greek Delta	Etruscan D	Roman D
<hiero>O31</hiero>	File:PhoenicianD-01.png	64px	64px	Roman D

The Semitic letter D let may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous but still retained (see letter B). The equivalent Greek letter is Delta, .

The minuscule (lower-case) form of d consists of a loop and a tall vertical stroke. It 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 slowly developed into a vertical stroke.

Usage

The letter D, standing for "Deutschland", i.e. Germany in German, on a boundary stone at the border between Austria and Germany. In nearly all languages that use the Latin alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet, d represents the voiced alveolar plosive , but in the Vietnamese alphabet it represents the sound (or in southern dialects). In Fijian it represents a prenasalized stop .^[2] In some languages where voiceless unaspirated stops contrast with voiceless aspirated stops, d represents an unaspirated , while t represents an aspirated . Examples of such languages include Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo, and the Pinyin transliteration of Mandarin.

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

character	D		d
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D		LATIN SMALL LETTER D
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	68	0044	100	0064
UTF-8	68	44	100	64
Numeric character reference	D	D	d	d
EBCDIC family	196	C4	132	84
ASCII ¹	68	44	100	64

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

In British Sign Language (BSL), the letter d is indicated by signing with the right hand held with index and thumb extended and slightly curved and tip of thumb and finger held against extended index of left hand.