'De' (Д, д) is a letter of the
Cyrillic alphabet. It represents a
voiced dental plosive except word-finally and before voiceless consonants, when it represents a voiceless and before any
palatalizing vowel, when it represents .
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". 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
2ch.
Encoding
The following table lists the different methods for
encoding the character electronically, in both its
majuscule (capital) and
minuscule (small) forms.
—The values represent Unicode code points. The binary values would be equivalent to UTF-16 big endian.