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Egyptian hieroglyph door	Proto-Semitic Dal, Daleth	Phoenician Daleth	Etruscan D	Greek Delta	Roman D
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	Topics D Topic Home D is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin.... . Its name in English English language English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa... is spelled dee , plural dees. le class="wikitable">
O31

The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram

Logogram

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D is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
is spelled dee , plural dees.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph door	Proto-Semitic Dal, Daleth	Phoenician Daleth	Etruscan D	Greek Delta	Roman D
O31

The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram

Logogram

A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonogram , which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantics....
for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that 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 retained (see letter B

For technical reasons, B# redirects here. For the musical note, see C B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled bee , plural bees....
). Greek letter: ?

Delta (letter)

Delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 4. It was derived from the Phoenician alphabet Dalet , but in the Ancient Greek language, it represented a voiced dental plosive ....
(capital) or d (small) (Delta).

The minuscule (lower-case) form of D consists of a loop and a tall vertical

Vertical

vetical means up and downAn object is in a vertical position when it is aligned in an "up-down" direction, roughly speaking perpendicular to the horizon or horizontal plane....
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

Serif

In typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface that has serifs is called a serif typeface ....
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

In most languages using the Latin alphabet, the letter d represents the sound , but in the Vietnamese alphabet

Vietnamese alphabet

The Vietnamese alphabet has the following 29 letters, in collation order:Vietnamese also uses the ten Digraph s and one Trigraph below.These groups were formerly considered single letters and are treated as such in older dictionaries....
it represents the sound in the north and in the south. At the end of German

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
words, d represents . In Fijian

Fijian language

Fijian is an Austronesian languages language of the Malayo-Polynesian languages spoken in Fiji. It has 350,000 first-language speakers, which is less than half the population of Fiji, but another 200,000 speak it as a second language....
it stands for the prenasalized

Prenasalized consonant

Prenasalized stops or consonants are phonetics sequences of nasal consonant plus plosive consonant that behave phonology like single consonants....
stop . In some languages where voice

Voice (phonetics)

Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sound, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced....
less unaspirated

Aspiration (phonetics)

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of Earth's atmosphere that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents....
stops contrast with voiceless aspirated stops, d represents an unaspirated , while t represents an aspirated . Examples of such languages include Icelandic

Icelandic language

Icelandic is a North Germanic languages, the language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese language and Norwegian dialects such as Telemark dialect and Sognam?l....
, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo

Navajo language

Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan languages spoken in the southwest United States by the Navajo people . It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages ....
, and the Pinyin

Pinyin

Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most commonly used Romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu is the Chinese Language, and pinyin means "phonetics", or more literally, "spelling sound" or "spelled sound"....
transliteration of Mandarin

Mandarin (linguistics)

Mandarin , is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin language has more native speakers than any other language....
.

Codes for computing

In Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
the capital D is codepoint U+0044 and the lower case d is U+0064.

The ASCII

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
code for capital D is 68 and for lower case d is 100; or in binary

Binary numeral system

The binary numeral system, or notation with a radix of 2. Owing to its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used internally by all modern computers....
01000100 and 01100100, respectively.

The EBCDIC

EBCDIC

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE , as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS ....
code for capital D is 196 and for lowercase d is 132.

The numeric character reference

Numeric character reference

A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of character s that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode....
s in HTML

HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
and XML are "D" and "d" for upper and lower case, respectively.

D

History

Usage

Codes for computing

See also

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