From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Edh (or eth or eđ) is a letter (capital Ð, lower-case ð) used in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and present-day Icelandic and Faroese. The letter had its origin as a d with a cross-stroke added. The lowercase version has retained the flowing shape of a Medieval scribe's d, which d itself has not.
In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental fricative, as in th in English "them". In the Icelandic and Faroese alphabets, ð follows d. In Anglo-Saxon, ð may represent the same sound as in Icelandic, or the voiceless th of "thread", both of which were also represented by thorn (þ). Edh was usually used when the diagraph was voiced (as in "the" or "that"). In Middle English, ð was no longer used.
Lower-case edh is used as a symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, again for a voiced dental fricative.
Some other languages have a letter that looks very similar to Ð. For instance there is the Croatian letter Đ (Latin capital letter D with stroke), for which the lowercase is đ. There is also Ɖ (Latin capital letter African D). These are in fact separate letters which just happen to be written almost the same, much like the old abbreviation for the Soviet Union СССР (SSSR) happens to resemble Latin CCCP.
Eth is also a communes of the Nord département in northern France.
