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D

D is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language|English is spelled '''dee''' (), plural '''dees'''."D" ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' 2nd edition (1989); ''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged'' (1993); "dee", ''op. cit.''

History

The Semitic letter Daleth|Dâlet probably 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 was pronounced /d/; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous, but still maintained (see letter B). Greek letter: Delta (letter)|Δ (capital) or δ (small) (Delta). The Lower case|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

In most languages using the Latin alphabet, the letter ''d'' represents the sound , but in the Vietnamese alphabet it represents the sound in the north and in the south. At the end of German language|German words, ''d'' represents . In Fijian language|Fijian it stands for the prenasalized consonant|prenasalized stop . In some languages where voice (phonetics)|voiceless aspiration (phonetics)|unaspirated stops contrast with voiceless aspirated stops, ''d'' represents an unaspirated , while ''t'' represents an aspirated . Examples of such languages include Icelandic language|Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo language|Navajo, and the Pinyin transliteration of Mandarin (linguistics)|Mandarin.

Codes for computing

In Unicode the majuscule|capital D is codepoint U+0044 and the Lower case|lowercase d is U+0064. The ASCII code for capital D is 68 and for lowercase the d is 100; or in Binary numeral system|binary 01000100 and 01100100, respectively. The EBCDIC code for capital D is 196 and for lowercase d is 132. The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "D" and "d" for upper and lower case respectively.

References

Category:Latin letters simple:D zh-yue:D bat-smg:D

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