Thorn or
þorn, is a letter in the
Old EnglishOld English alphabet may refer to* Anglo-Saxon runes , a runic alphabet used to write Old English from the 5th century* Old English Latin alphabet, a Latin-derived alphabet used to write Old English from the 9th to the 12th centuries...
, Old Norse, and
Icelandic alphabetThe modern Icelandic alphabet consists of the following 32 letters:It is a Latin alphabet with diacritics, in addition it includes the character eth Ðð and the runic letter thorn Þþ...
s, as well as some dialects of
Middle EnglishMiddle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
. It was also used in
medievalThe Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
ScandinaviaScandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
, but was later replaced with the
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
thTh is a digraph in the Roman alphabet. It is the most common digraph in order of frequency in the English language.-Cluster /t.h/:The most literal use of ⟨th⟩ is to represent a consonant cluster of /t/ and /h/ as in English knighthood...
. The letter originated from the
runeThe runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
in the Elder Fuþark, called
thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and
thorn or
thursThurs may refer to:*Thurs, also Thurse, a mythological race with superhuman strength in Norse mythology. See Jötunn.*a name of Thor*Thurisaz ᚦ, the rune expressing the thorn phoneme*Thursday, as an abbreviation...
("
giantThe mythology and legends of many different cultures include monsters of human appearance but prodigious size and strength. "Giant" is the English word commonly used for such beings, derived from one of the most famed examples: the gigantes of Greek mythology.In various Indo-European mythologies,...
") in the Scandinavian
rune poemThe Rune Poems are three poems that list the letters of runic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Three different poems have been preserved: the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the Norwegian Rune Poem, and the Icelandic Rune Poem.The Icelandic and Norwegian poems list 16...
s, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being
Thurisaz.
It has the sound of either a
voiceless dental fricativeThe voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in thing. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential...
[θ], like
th as in the
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
word
thick, or a
voiced dental fricativeThe voiced dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound, eth, is . The symbol was taken from the Old English letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced...
[ð], like
th as in the English word
the. Modern Icelandic usage excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter
ethEth is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese , and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line through the vertical stroke...
(Ð, ð), though it has a voiceless
allophoneIn phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
[θ], which occurs in certain positions within a phrase.
In its
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, the thorn is one of the few
charactersA glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
in a Latin-derived alphabet whose modern lower-case form has greater height than the capital in its normal (
romanIn typography, roman is one of the three main kinds of historical type, alongside blackletter and italic. Roman type was modelled from a European scribal manuscript style of the 1400s, based on the pairing of inscriptional capitals used in ancient Rome with Carolingian minuscules developed in the...
), non-
italicIn typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
form.
Old English
The letter thorn was used for writing
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
very early on, as was
ðA Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
; but, unlike ð, thorn remained in common use through most of the
Middle EnglishMiddle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
period. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe. This sound was regularly realized in Old English as the voiced fricative [ð] between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of [ð] in
phonetic alphabetsThe International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the ascender crossed (Ꝥ) was a popular abbreviation for the word
thatThe word that is used in the English language for several grammatical purposes:* to introduce a restrictive relative clause * as a demonstrative pronoun...
.
Middle and Early Modern English
The modern
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of thorn grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old
wynnWynn is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound ....
, which had fallen out of use by 1300) and, in some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th century manuscript of
The Boke of Margery KempeMargery Kempe is known for dictating The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. This book chronicles, to some extent, her extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia, as well as her mystical conversations with God...
, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from the letter Y. By this stage
th was predominant, however, and the usage of thorn was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In
William CaxtonWilliam Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...
's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviated
the, written with a thorn and a superscript E. This was the longest-lived usage, though the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous, leading to the common 'ye's as in '
Ye OldeYe Olde is a pseudo-Early Modern English stock prefix, used anachronistically, suggestive of a Deep England feel.A typical example would be Ye Olde English Pubbe or similar names of theme pubs....
Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this is that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, and thorn did not. The first printing of the
King James Version of the BibleThe Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James Version, King James Bible or KJV, is an English translation of the Christian Bible by the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611...
in 1611 used the Y form of thorn with a superscript E in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29. It also used a similar form with a superscript T, which was an abbreviated
thatThe word that is used in the English language for several grammatical purposes:* to introduce a restrictive relative clause * as a demonstrative pronoun...
, in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by
the or
that, respectively.
Abbreviations
The following were abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:
-
– (þe) a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
-
– (þt) a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
-
– (þu) a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thouThe word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine...
(which was written early on as þu or þou)
- (ys) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
- – (ye) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
- – (yt) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that
Modern English
Thorn in the form of a
Y survives to this day in pseudo-archaic usages, particularly the stock prefix
Ye oldeYe Olde is a pseudo-Early Modern English stock prefix, used anachronistically, suggestive of a Deep England feel.A typical example would be Ye Olde English Pubbe or similar names of theme pubs....
. The
definite articleDefinite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...
spelled with
Y for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced /jiː/ or mistaken for the archaic
nominative caseThe nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
of
youYou is the second-personpersonal pronoun, both singular and plural, and both nominative and objective case, in Modern English. The oblique/objective form you functioned originally as both accusative and dative)...
, namely
yeYe was the second-person, plural, personal pronoun , spelled in Old English as "ge". In Middle English and Early Modern English, it was used to direct an equal or superior person...
.
A handwritten form of thorn that was similar to the letter 'y' in appearance with a small 'e' written above it as an abbreviation for 'the' was common in early Modern English. This can still be seen in reprints of the 1611 edition of the King James Version of the Bible in places such as
RomansThe Epistle of Paul to the Romans, often shortened to Romans, is the sixth book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by the Apostle Paul to explain that Salvation is offered through the Gospel of Jesus Christ...
15:29, or in the
Mayflower CompactThe Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. It was written by the colonists, later together known to history as the Pilgrims, who crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower...
. Note that the article was never pronounced with a y sound, even when so written.
Icelandic
The
Icelandic languageIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
is the only living language to retain the letter thorn (in Icelandic;
þorn, pronounced
þoddn, [θ̠ɔtn̥]) in common usage. The letter is the 30th in the
Icelandic alphabetThe modern Icelandic alphabet consists of the following 32 letters:It is a Latin alphabet with diacritics, in addition it includes the character eth Ðð and the runic letter thorn Þþ...
and never appears at the end of a word. Its pronunciation has not varied much, but in earlier times
þorn was sometimes used instead of
ðA Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
as in the word "
verþa" which is
verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic. Þorn was originally taken from the
runic alphabetThe runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
and is described in the
First Grammatical TreatiseThe First Grammatical Treatise is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic manuscript Codex Wormianus...
:
Constructed Languages
The thorn is a letter of the alphabet of the Talossan language, in which it may also be seen represented (for convenience) by the
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
TG.
Computing codes
| character |
Þ |
þ |
| Unicode name |
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN |
LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN |
| character encoding |
decimal |
hex |
decimal |
hex |
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
|
222 |
00DE |
254 |
00FE |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
|
195 158 |
C3 9E |
195 190 |
C3 BE |
| Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...
|
Þ |
Þ |
þ |
þ |
| Character entity reference In the markup languages SGML, HTML, XHTML and XML, a character entity reference is a reference to a particular kind of named entity that has been predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition . The "replacement text" of the entity consists of a single character from the Universal...
|
Þ |
þ |
| EBCDIC 500 IBM code page 500 is an EBCDIC code page with full Latin-1-charset used in IBM mainframes.CCSID 1148 is the Euro currency update of code page/CCSID 500. Byte 9F is replaced ¤ with € in that code page.-Codepage layout:...
|
174 |
AE |
142 |
8E |
| CP 850 Code page 850 is a code page used under MS-DOS in Western Europe. It is the code page commonly used by the version of MS-DOS underlying Windows ME...
, CP 858Code page 858 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Western European languages.Code page 858 was created from code page 850 in 1998 by changing code point 213 from dotless I ⟨ı⟩ to the euro sign ⟨€⟩....
|
232 |
E8 |
231 |
E7 |
| CP 861 Code page 861 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write the Icelandic language .-Code page layout:...
|
141 |
8D |
149 |
95 |
| Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
,
ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 |
222 |
DE |
254 |
FE |
LaTeXLaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
|
\TH |
\th |
Computer keyboarding
Thorn can be typed on a normal
QWERTYQWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
keyboard using various system dependent methods (see chart below). Thorn may also be accessible by copy-and-pasting from a
character mapCharacter Map is a utility included with Microsoft Windows operating systems and is used to view the characters in any installed font, to check what keyboard input is used to enter those characters, and to copy characters to the clipboard in lieu of typing them. The tool is usually useful for...
, through changing the keyboard layout or through a
compose keyA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
.
Typing Þ (thorn) on computers
| Computer System | Method for Þ | Method for þ | Notes |
Compose keyA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
("Multi Key") |
|
|
Compose is a dead key A dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a typewriter or computer keyboard that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a character by itself but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after...
meaning it is pressed & released rather than held down |
| GTK+ GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...
|
|
|
GTK+ is ISO 14755-conformant for Unicode input Unicode input is the insertion of a specific Unicode character on a computer. Unicode characters can be inserted in two ways: from the screen by means of an applet from which one can select the character, or by input of the Unicode character from the keyboard...
|
| Icelandic keyboard |
|
|
Can be typed directly |
MacintoshMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
|
|
|
“U.S. Extended” or "Irish Extended" keyboard layout must be selected |
| Unix Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
|
Use either Compose key or GTK+ method (see above) |
UK keyboard (LinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
) |
|
|
|
| US-International keyboard |
|
|
|
WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
|
or |
|
Numbers must be typed on the numeric keypadA numeric keypad, numpad or tenkey for short, is the small, palm-sized, seventeen key section of a computer keyboard, usually on the very far right. The numeric keypad features digits 0 to 9, addition , subtraction , multiplication and division symbols, a decimal point and Num Lock and Enter keys...
|
Variants
A thorn with a stroke on the ascender (
Thorn or
þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the
Old EnglishOld English alphabet may refer to* Anglo-Saxon runes , a runic alphabet used to write Old English from the 5th century* Old English Latin alphabet, a Latin-derived alphabet used to write Old English from the 9th to the 12th centuries...
, Old Norse, and
Icelandic alphabetThe modern Icelandic alphabet consists of the following 32 letters:It is a Latin alphabet with diacritics, in addition it includes the character eth Ðð and the runic letter thorn Þþ...
s, as well as some dialects of
Middle EnglishMiddle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
. It was also used in
medievalThe Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
ScandinaviaScandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
, but was later replaced with the
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
thTh is a digraph in the Roman alphabet. It is the most common digraph in order of frequency in the English language.-Cluster /t.h/:The most literal use of ⟨th⟩ is to represent a consonant cluster of /t/ and /h/ as in English knighthood...
. The letter originated from the
runeThe runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
{{Runic|ᚦ}} in the Elder Fuþark, called
thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and
thorn or
thursThurs may refer to:*Thurs, also Thurse, a mythological race with superhuman strength in Norse mythology. See Jötunn.*a name of Thor*Thurisaz ᚦ, the rune expressing the thorn phoneme*Thursday, as an abbreviation...
("
giantThe mythology and legends of many different cultures include monsters of human appearance but prodigious size and strength. "Giant" is the English word commonly used for such beings, derived from one of the most famed examples: the gigantes of Greek mythology.In various Indo-European mythologies,...
") in the Scandinavian
rune poemThe Rune Poems are three poems that list the letters of runic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Three different poems have been preserved: the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the Norwegian Rune Poem, and the Icelandic Rune Poem.The Icelandic and Norwegian poems list 16...
s, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being
Thurisaz.
It has the sound of either a
voiceless dental fricativeThe voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in thing. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential...
[θ], like
th as in the
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
word
thick, or a
voiced dental fricativeThe voiced dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound, eth, is . The symbol was taken from the Old English letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced...
[ð], like
th as in the English word
the. Modern Icelandic usage excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter
ethEth is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese , and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line through the vertical stroke...
(Ð, ð), though it has a voiceless
allophoneIn phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
[θ], which occurs in certain positions within a phrase.
In its
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, the thorn is one of the few
charactersA glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
in a Latin-derived alphabet whose modern lower-case form has greater height than the capital in its normal (
romanIn typography, roman is one of the three main kinds of historical type, alongside blackletter and italic. Roman type was modelled from a European scribal manuscript style of the 1400s, based on the pairing of inscriptional capitals used in ancient Rome with Carolingian minuscules developed in the...
), non-
italicIn typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
form.
Old English
The letter thorn was used for writing
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
very early on, as was
ðA Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
; but, unlike ð, thorn remained in common use through most of the
Middle EnglishMiddle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
period. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe. This sound was regularly realized in Old English as the voiced fricative [ð] between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of [ð] in
phonetic alphabetsThe International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the ascender crossed (Ꝥ) was a popular abbreviation for the word
thatThe word that is used in the English language for several grammatical purposes:* to introduce a restrictive relative clause * as a demonstrative pronoun...
.
Middle and Early Modern English
The modern
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of thorn grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old
wynnWynn is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound ....
({{lang|ang|Ƿ, ƿ}}), which had fallen out of use by 1300) and, in some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th century manuscript of
The Boke of Margery KempeMargery Kempe is known for dictating The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. This book chronicles, to some extent, her extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia, as well as her mystical conversations with God...
, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from the letter Y. By this stage
th was predominant, however, and the usage of thorn was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In
William CaxtonWilliam Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...
's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviated
the, written with a thorn and a superscript E. This was the longest-lived usage, though the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous, leading to the common 'ye's as in '
Ye OldeYe Olde is a pseudo-Early Modern English stock prefix, used anachronistically, suggestive of a Deep England feel.A typical example would be Ye Olde English Pubbe or similar names of theme pubs....
Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this is that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, and thorn did not. The first printing of the
King James Version of the BibleThe Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James Version, King James Bible or KJV, is an English translation of the Christian Bible by the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611...
in 1611 used the Y form of thorn with a superscript E in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29. It also used a similar form with a superscript T, which was an abbreviated
thatThe word that is used in the English language for several grammatical purposes:* to introduce a restrictive relative clause * as a demonstrative pronoun...
, in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by
the or
that, respectively.
Abbreviations
The following were abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:
- – (þe) a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
- – (þt) a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
- – (þu) a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou
The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine...
(which was written early on as þu or þou)
- (ys) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
- – (ye) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
- – (yt) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that
Modern English
Thorn in the form of a
Y survives to this day in pseudo-archaic usages, particularly the stock prefix
Ye oldeYe Olde is a pseudo-Early Modern English stock prefix, used anachronistically, suggestive of a Deep England feel.A typical example would be Ye Olde English Pubbe or similar names of theme pubs....
. The
definite articleDefinite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...
spelled with
Y for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced /jiː/ or mistaken for the archaic
nominative caseThe nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
of
youYou is the second-personpersonal pronoun, both singular and plural, and both nominative and objective case, in Modern English. The oblique/objective form you functioned originally as both accusative and dative)...
, namely
yeYe was the second-person, plural, personal pronoun , spelled in Old English as "ge". In Middle English and Early Modern English, it was used to direct an equal or superior person...
.
A handwritten form of thorn that was similar to the letter 'y' in appearance with a small 'e' written above it as an abbreviation for 'the' was common in early Modern English. This can still be seen in reprints of the 1611 edition of the King James Version of the Bible in places such as
RomansThe Epistle of Paul to the Romans, often shortened to Romans, is the sixth book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by the Apostle Paul to explain that Salvation is offered through the Gospel of Jesus Christ...
15:29, or in the
Mayflower CompactThe Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. It was written by the colonists, later together known to history as the Pilgrims, who crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower...
. Note that the article was never pronounced with a y sound, even when so written.
Icelandic
The
Icelandic languageIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
is the only living language to retain the letter thorn (in Icelandic;
þorn, pronounced
þoddn, [θ̠ɔtn̥]) in common usage. The letter is the 30th in the
Icelandic alphabetThe modern Icelandic alphabet consists of the following 32 letters:It is a Latin alphabet with diacritics, in addition it includes the character eth Ðð and the runic letter thorn Þþ...
and never appears at the end of a word. Its pronunciation has not varied much, but in earlier times
þorn was sometimes used instead of
ðA Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
as in the word "
verþa" which is
verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic. Þorn was originally taken from the
runic alphabetThe runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
and is described in the
First Grammatical TreatiseThe First Grammatical Treatise is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic manuscript Codex Wormianus...
:
{{Cquote2|Staf þann er flestir menn kalla
þorn þann kalla ég af því heldur
þe að þá er það atkvæði hans í hverju máli sem eftir lifir nafnsins er úr er tekinn raddarstafur úr nafni hans, sem alla hefi ég samhljóðendur samda í það mark nú sem ég reit snemma í þeirra umræðu. Skal
þ standa fyrri í stafrófi en titull þó að ég hafi síðar umræðu um hann því að hann er síðast í fundinn, en af því fyrr um titul að hann var áður í stafrófi og ég lét hann þeim fylgja í umræðu eru honum líkir þarfnast sína jartein. Höfuðstaf
þe-sins rita ég hvergi nema í vers upphafi því að hans atkvæði má eigi æxla þótt hann standi eftir raddarstaf í samstöfun.|From the
First Grammatical TreatiseThe First Grammatical Treatise is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic manuscript Codex Wormianus...
by the First Grammarian}}
Constructed Languages
The thorn is a letter of the alphabet of the Talossan language, in which it may also be seen represented (for convenience) by the
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
TG.
{{anchor|Computers}}
Computing codes
| character |
Þ |
þ |
| Unicode name |
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN |
LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN |
| character encoding |
decimal |
hex |
decimal |
hex |
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
|
222 |
00DE |
254 |
00FE |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
|
195 158 |
C3 9E |
195 190 |
C3 BE |
| Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...
|
Þ |
Þ |
þ |
þ |
| Character entity reference In the markup languages SGML, HTML, XHTML and XML, a character entity reference is a reference to a particular kind of named entity that has been predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition . The "replacement text" of the entity consists of a single character from the Universal...
|
Þ |
þ |
| EBCDIC 500 IBM code page 500 is an EBCDIC code page with full Latin-1-charset used in IBM mainframes.CCSID 1148 is the Euro currency update of code page/CCSID 500. Byte 9F is replaced ¤ with € in that code page.-Codepage layout:...
|
174 |
AE |
142 |
8E |
| CP 850 Code page 850 is a code page used under MS-DOS in Western Europe. It is the code page commonly used by the version of MS-DOS underlying Windows ME...
, CP 858Code page 858 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Western European languages.Code page 858 was created from code page 850 in 1998 by changing code point 213 from dotless I ⟨ı⟩ to the euro sign ⟨€⟩....
|
232 |
E8 |
231 |
E7 |
| CP 861 Code page 861 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write the Icelandic language .-Code page layout:...
|
141 |
8D |
149 |
95 |
| Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
,
ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 |
222 |
DE |
254 |
FE |
LaTeXLaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
|
\TH |
\th |
Computer keyboarding
Thorn can be typed on a normal
QWERTYQWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
keyboard using various system dependent methods (see chart below). Thorn may also be accessible by copy-and-pasting from a
character mapCharacter Map is a utility included with Microsoft Windows operating systems and is used to view the characters in any installed font, to check what keyboard input is used to enter those characters, and to copy characters to the clipboard in lieu of typing them. The tool is usually useful for...
, through changing the keyboard layout or through a
compose keyA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
.
Typing Þ (thorn) on computers
| Computer System | Method for Þ | Method for þ | Notes |
Compose keyA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
("Multi Key") |
{{keypress|ComposeA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
}} {{keypress|Shift |
T}} {{keypress|Shift |
H}} |
{{keypress|ComposeA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
}} {{keypress|t}} {{keypress|h}} |
Compose is a dead key A dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a typewriter or computer keyboard that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a character by itself but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after...
meaning it is pressed & released rather than held down |
| GTK+ GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...
|
{{keypress|Ctrl|Shift|u}} {{keypress|d}}{{keypress|e}} {{keypress|Enter}} |
{{keypress|Ctrl|Shift|u}} {{keypress|f}}{{keypress|e}} {{keypress|Enter}} |
GTK+ is ISO 14755-conformant for Unicode input Unicode input is the insertion of a specific Unicode character on a computer. Unicode characters can be inserted in two ways: from the screen by means of an applet from which one can select the character, or by input of the Unicode character from the keyboard...
|
| Icelandic keyboard |
{{keypress|Þ}} |
{{keypress|þ}} |
Can be typed directly |
MacintoshMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
|
{{keypress|Opt The Option key is a modifier key present on Apple keyboards. It is located between the Control key and Command key on a typical Mac keyboard. There are two option keys on modern Mac desktop and notebook keyboards, one on each side of the space bar....
|Shift|T}} |
{{keypress|Opt The Option key is a modifier key present on Apple keyboards. It is located between the Control key and Command key on a typical Mac keyboard. There are two option keys on modern Mac desktop and notebook keyboards, one on each side of the space bar....
|t}} |
“U.S. Extended” or "Irish Extended" keyboard layout must be selected |
| Unix Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
|
Use either Compose key or GTK+ method (see above) |
UK keyboard (LinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
) |
{{keypress|AltGr|Shift |
P}} |
{{keypress|AltGr|p}} |
|
| US-International keyboard |
{{keypress|AltGr|Shift |
T}} |
{{keypress|AltGr|t}} |
|
WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
|
{{keypress|Alt The Alt key on a computer keyboard is used to change the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing "A" will type the letter a, but if you hold down either Alt key while pressing A, the computer...
|0|2|2|2}} or {{keypress|AltThe Alt key on a computer keyboard is used to change the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing "A" will type the letter a, but if you hold down either Alt key while pressing A, the computer...
|2|3|2}} |
{{keypress|Alt The Alt key on a computer keyboard is used to change the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing "A" will type the letter a, but if you hold down either Alt key while pressing A, the computer...
|0|2|5|4}} |
Numbers must be typed on the numeric keypadA numeric keypad, numpad or tenkey for short, is the small, palm-sized, seventeen key section of a computer keyboard, usually on the very far right. The numeric keypad features digits 0 to 9, addition , subtraction , multiplication and division symbols, a decimal point and Num Lock and Enter keys...
|
Variants
A thorn with a stroke on the ascender (
Thorn or
þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the
Old EnglishOld English alphabet may refer to* Anglo-Saxon runes , a runic alphabet used to write Old English from the 5th century* Old English Latin alphabet, a Latin-derived alphabet used to write Old English from the 9th to the 12th centuries...
, Old Norse, and
Icelandic alphabetThe modern Icelandic alphabet consists of the following 32 letters:It is a Latin alphabet with diacritics, in addition it includes the character eth Ðð and the runic letter thorn Þþ...
s, as well as some dialects of
Middle EnglishMiddle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
. It was also used in
medievalThe Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
ScandinaviaScandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
, but was later replaced with the
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
thTh is a digraph in the Roman alphabet. It is the most common digraph in order of frequency in the English language.-Cluster /t.h/:The most literal use of ⟨th⟩ is to represent a consonant cluster of /t/ and /h/ as in English knighthood...
. The letter originated from the
runeThe runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
{{Runic|ᚦ}} in the Elder Fuþark, called
thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and
thorn or
thursThurs may refer to:*Thurs, also Thurse, a mythological race with superhuman strength in Norse mythology. See Jötunn.*a name of Thor*Thurisaz ᚦ, the rune expressing the thorn phoneme*Thursday, as an abbreviation...
("
giantThe mythology and legends of many different cultures include monsters of human appearance but prodigious size and strength. "Giant" is the English word commonly used for such beings, derived from one of the most famed examples: the gigantes of Greek mythology.In various Indo-European mythologies,...
") in the Scandinavian
rune poemThe Rune Poems are three poems that list the letters of runic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Three different poems have been preserved: the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the Norwegian Rune Poem, and the Icelandic Rune Poem.The Icelandic and Norwegian poems list 16...
s, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being
Thurisaz.
It has the sound of either a
voiceless dental fricativeThe voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in thing. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential...
[θ], like
th as in the
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
word
thick, or a
voiced dental fricativeThe voiced dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound, eth, is . The symbol was taken from the Old English letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced...
[ð], like
th as in the English word
the. Modern Icelandic usage excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter
ethEth is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese , and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line through the vertical stroke...
(Ð, ð), though it has a voiceless
allophoneIn phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
[θ], which occurs in certain positions within a phrase.
In its
typographyTypography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
, the thorn is one of the few
charactersA glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
in a Latin-derived alphabet whose modern lower-case form has greater height than the capital in its normal (
romanIn typography, roman is one of the three main kinds of historical type, alongside blackletter and italic. Roman type was modelled from a European scribal manuscript style of the 1400s, based on the pairing of inscriptional capitals used in ancient Rome with Carolingian minuscules developed in the...
), non-
italicIn typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
form.
Old English
The letter thorn was used for writing
Old EnglishOld English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
very early on, as was
ðA Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
; but, unlike ð, thorn remained in common use through most of the
Middle EnglishMiddle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
period. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe. This sound was regularly realized in Old English as the voiced fricative [ð] between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of [ð] in
phonetic alphabetsThe International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the ascender crossed (Ꝥ) was a popular abbreviation for the word
thatThe word that is used in the English language for several grammatical purposes:* to introduce a restrictive relative clause * as a demonstrative pronoun...
.
Middle and Early Modern English
The modern
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of thorn grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old
wynnWynn is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound ....
({{lang|ang|Ƿ, ƿ}}), which had fallen out of use by 1300) and, in some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th century manuscript of
The Boke of Margery KempeMargery Kempe is known for dictating The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. This book chronicles, to some extent, her extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia, as well as her mystical conversations with God...
, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from the letter Y. By this stage
th was predominant, however, and the usage of thorn was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In
William CaxtonWilliam Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...
's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviated
the, written with a thorn and a superscript E. This was the longest-lived usage, though the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous, leading to the common 'ye's as in '
Ye OldeYe Olde is a pseudo-Early Modern English stock prefix, used anachronistically, suggestive of a Deep England feel.A typical example would be Ye Olde English Pubbe or similar names of theme pubs....
Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this is that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, and thorn did not. The first printing of the
King James Version of the BibleThe Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James Version, King James Bible or KJV, is an English translation of the Christian Bible by the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611...
in 1611 used the Y form of thorn with a superscript E in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29. It also used a similar form with a superscript T, which was an abbreviated
thatThe word that is used in the English language for several grammatical purposes:* to introduce a restrictive relative clause * as a demonstrative pronoun...
, in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by
the or
that, respectively.
Abbreviations
The following were abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:
- – (þe) a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
- – (þt) a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
- – (þu) a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou
The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine...
(which was written early on as þu or þou)
- (ys) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
- – (ye) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
- – (yt) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that
Modern English
Thorn in the form of a
Y survives to this day in pseudo-archaic usages, particularly the stock prefix
Ye oldeYe Olde is a pseudo-Early Modern English stock prefix, used anachronistically, suggestive of a Deep England feel.A typical example would be Ye Olde English Pubbe or similar names of theme pubs....
. The
definite articleDefinite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...
spelled with
Y for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced /jiː/ or mistaken for the archaic
nominative caseThe nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
of
youYou is the second-personpersonal pronoun, both singular and plural, and both nominative and objective case, in Modern English. The oblique/objective form you functioned originally as both accusative and dative)...
, namely
yeYe was the second-person, plural, personal pronoun , spelled in Old English as "ge". In Middle English and Early Modern English, it was used to direct an equal or superior person...
.
A handwritten form of thorn that was similar to the letter 'y' in appearance with a small 'e' written above it as an abbreviation for 'the' was common in early Modern English. This can still be seen in reprints of the 1611 edition of the King James Version of the Bible in places such as
RomansThe Epistle of Paul to the Romans, often shortened to Romans, is the sixth book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by the Apostle Paul to explain that Salvation is offered through the Gospel of Jesus Christ...
15:29, or in the
Mayflower CompactThe Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. It was written by the colonists, later together known to history as the Pilgrims, who crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower...
. Note that the article was never pronounced with a y sound, even when so written.
Icelandic
The
Icelandic languageIcelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
is the only living language to retain the letter thorn (in Icelandic;
þorn, pronounced
þoddn, [θ̠ɔtn̥]) in common usage. The letter is the 30th in the
Icelandic alphabetThe modern Icelandic alphabet consists of the following 32 letters:It is a Latin alphabet with diacritics, in addition it includes the character eth Ðð and the runic letter thorn Þþ...
and never appears at the end of a word. Its pronunciation has not varied much, but in earlier times
þorn was sometimes used instead of
ðA Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...
as in the word "
verþa" which is
verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic. Þorn was originally taken from the
runic alphabetThe runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
and is described in the
First Grammatical TreatiseThe First Grammatical Treatise is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic manuscript Codex Wormianus...
:
{{Cquote2|Staf þann er flestir menn kalla
þorn þann kalla ég af því heldur
þe að þá er það atkvæði hans í hverju máli sem eftir lifir nafnsins er úr er tekinn raddarstafur úr nafni hans, sem alla hefi ég samhljóðendur samda í það mark nú sem ég reit snemma í þeirra umræðu. Skal
þ standa fyrri í stafrófi en titull þó að ég hafi síðar umræðu um hann því að hann er síðast í fundinn, en af því fyrr um titul að hann var áður í stafrófi og ég lét hann þeim fylgja í umræðu eru honum líkir þarfnast sína jartein. Höfuðstaf
þe-sins rita ég hvergi nema í vers upphafi því að hans atkvæði má eigi æxla þótt hann standi eftir raddarstaf í samstöfun.|From the
First Grammatical TreatiseThe First Grammatical Treatise is a 12th-century work on the phonology of the Old Norse or Old Icelandic language. It was given this name because it is the first of four grammatical works bound in the Icelandic manuscript Codex Wormianus...
by the First Grammarian}}
Constructed Languages
The thorn is a letter of the alphabet of the Talossan language, in which it may also be seen represented (for convenience) by the
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
TG.
{{anchor|Computers}}
Computing codes
| character |
Þ |
þ |
| Unicode name |
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN |
LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN |
| character encoding |
decimal |
hex |
decimal |
hex |
UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
|
222 |
00DE |
254 |
00FE |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
|
195 158 |
C3 9E |
195 190 |
C3 BE |
| Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...
|
Þ |
Þ |
þ |
þ |
| Character entity reference In the markup languages SGML, HTML, XHTML and XML, a character entity reference is a reference to a particular kind of named entity that has been predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition . The "replacement text" of the entity consists of a single character from the Universal...
|
Þ |
þ |
| EBCDIC 500 IBM code page 500 is an EBCDIC code page with full Latin-1-charset used in IBM mainframes.CCSID 1148 is the Euro currency update of code page/CCSID 500. Byte 9F is replaced ¤ with € in that code page.-Codepage layout:...
|
174 |
AE |
142 |
8E |
| CP 850 Code page 850 is a code page used under MS-DOS in Western Europe. It is the code page commonly used by the version of MS-DOS underlying Windows ME...
, CP 858Code page 858 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Western European languages.Code page 858 was created from code page 850 in 1998 by changing code point 213 from dotless I ⟨ı⟩ to the euro sign ⟨€⟩....
|
232 |
E8 |
231 |
E7 |
| CP 861 Code page 861 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write the Icelandic language .-Code page layout:...
|
141 |
8D |
149 |
95 |
| Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
,
ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 |
222 |
DE |
254 |
FE |
LaTeXLaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...
|
\TH |
\th |
Computer keyboarding
Thorn can be typed on a normal
QWERTYQWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
keyboard using various system dependent methods (see chart below). Thorn may also be accessible by copy-and-pasting from a
character mapCharacter Map is a utility included with Microsoft Windows operating systems and is used to view the characters in any installed font, to check what keyboard input is used to enter those characters, and to copy characters to the clipboard in lieu of typing them. The tool is usually useful for...
, through changing the keyboard layout or through a
compose keyA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
.
Typing Þ (thorn) on computers
| Computer System | Method for Þ | Method for þ | Notes |
Compose keyA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
("Multi Key") |
{{keypress|ComposeA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
}} {{keypress|Shift |
T}} {{keypress|Shift |
H}} |
{{keypress|ComposeA compose key, available on some computer keyboards, is a special kind of modifier key designated to signal the software to interpret the following sequence of two keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found directly on the keyboard...
}} {{keypress|t}} {{keypress|h}} |
Compose is a dead key A dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a typewriter or computer keyboard that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a character by itself but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after...
meaning it is pressed & released rather than held down |
| GTK+ GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...
|
{{keypress|Ctrl|Shift|u}} {{keypress|d}}{{keypress|e}} {{keypress|Enter}} |
{{keypress|Ctrl|Shift|u}} {{keypress|f}}{{keypress|e}} {{keypress|Enter}} |
GTK+ is ISO 14755-conformant for Unicode input Unicode input is the insertion of a specific Unicode character on a computer. Unicode characters can be inserted in two ways: from the screen by means of an applet from which one can select the character, or by input of the Unicode character from the keyboard...
|
| Icelandic keyboard |
{{keypress|Þ}} |
{{keypress|þ}} |
Can be typed directly |
MacintoshMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
|
{{keypress|Opt The Option key is a modifier key present on Apple keyboards. It is located between the Control key and Command key on a typical Mac keyboard. There are two option keys on modern Mac desktop and notebook keyboards, one on each side of the space bar....
|Shift|T}} |
{{keypress|Opt The Option key is a modifier key present on Apple keyboards. It is located between the Control key and Command key on a typical Mac keyboard. There are two option keys on modern Mac desktop and notebook keyboards, one on each side of the space bar....
|t}} |
“U.S. Extended” or "Irish Extended" keyboard layout must be selected |
| Unix Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
|
Use either Compose key or GTK+ method (see above) |
UK keyboard (LinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
) |
{{keypress|AltGr|Shift |
P}} |
{{keypress|AltGr|p}} |
|
| US-International keyboard |
{{keypress|AltGr|Shift |
T}} |
{{keypress|AltGr|t}} |
|
WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
|
{{keypress|Alt The Alt key on a computer keyboard is used to change the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing "A" will type the letter a, but if you hold down either Alt key while pressing A, the computer...
|0|2|2|2}} or {{keypress|AltThe Alt key on a computer keyboard is used to change the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing "A" will type the letter a, but if you hold down either Alt key while pressing A, the computer...
|2|3|2}} |
{{keypress|Alt The Alt key on a computer keyboard is used to change the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing "A" will type the letter a, but if you hold down either Alt key while pressing A, the computer...
|0|2|5|4}} |
Numbers must be typed on the numeric keypadA numeric keypad, numpad or tenkey for short, is the small, palm-sized, seventeen key section of a computer keyboard, usually on the very far right. The numeric keypad features digits 0 to 9, addition , subtraction , multiplication and division symbols, a decimal point and Num Lock and Enter keys...
|
Variants
A thorn with a stroke on the ascender ({{Unicode was used in English (see the section on usage).
A thorn with a stroke on the descender also exists ({{Unicode|
Ꝧꝧ}}). The capital form is at codepoint U+A766, and the minuscule form is at codepoint U+A767.
External links
{{Commons|Þ}}
{{Latin alphabet}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thorn (Letter)}}