English Old English The letter thorn was used in
Old English very early on, as was
eth (ð, which was called eð). Unlike eth, thorn remained in common use through most of the
Middle English period. Both letters were used for the phoneme , sometimes by the same scribe. This sound was regularly realised in
Old English as the voiced fricative between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of in
phonetic alphabets is not the same as the
Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the
ascender crossed (
Ꝥ) was a popular abbreviation for the word
that.
Middle and Early Modern English '') The modern digraph
th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old
wynn (, ), which had fallen out of use by 1300, and to ancient through modern , ). By this stage,
th was predominant and the use of was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. This was the longest-lived use, though with the arrival of
movable type printing, the substitution of for became ubiquitous, leading to the common "
ye", as in '
Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that existed in the printer's
types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while did not. The word was never pronounced as /j/, as in ⟨
yes⟩, though, even when so written. The first printing of the
King James Version of the Bible in 1611 used
ye for "
the" in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29. It also used
yt as an abbreviation for "
that", in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by
the or
that, respectively.
Abbreviations in Middle and Early Modern English The following were
scribal abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn: • The
thorn with stroke (or barred thorn) is an early manuscript abbreviation inherited from
Old English. It is the letter , with a bold horizontal stroke through the ascender, and it represents the word
þæt, meaning "the" or "that" (neuter
nom. /
acc.). The letter , a thorn with stroke through the descender, is less common, and represents the word
þurh, meaning "through." • a Middle English abbreviation for the word
the • a Middle English abbreviation for the word
that • a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word
thou (which was written early on as or ) In later printed texts, given the lack of a
sort for the glyph, and never appears at the end of a word. For example, the name of
Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson is
anglicised as Haf
thor. Its pronunciation has not varied much, but before the introduction of the
eth character,
þ was used to represent the sound , as in the word "
verþa", which is now spelt
verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic or normalized orthography. Þ was originally taken from the
runic alphabet and is described in the
First Grammatical Treatise from the 12th-century: (left) and
serif (right) ==Computing codes==