Antiquity (280 BC) reveals the full development of the Latin by that time; the letter at the same time still retains its archaic shape distinguishing it from Greek or Old Italic
rho. The letter is believed to derive ultimately from an image of a head, used in
Semitic alphabets for the sound because the word for 'head' was
rêš or similar in most
Semitic languages. The word became the name of the letter, as an example of
acrophony. It developed into Greek () and Latin . The descending diagonal stroke develops as a graphic variant in some
Western Greek alphabets (writing
rho as ⟨⟩), but it was not adopted in most
Old Italic alphabets; most Old Italic alphabets show variants of their
rho between a and a shape, but without the Western Greek descending stroke. Indeed, the oldest known forms of the Latin alphabet itself of the 7th to 6th centuries BC, in the
Duenos and the
Forum inscription, still write using the shape of the letter. The
Lapis Satricanus inscription shows the form of the Latin alphabet around 500 BC. Here, the rounded, closing ⟨Π⟩ shape of the and the shape of the have become difficult to distinguish. The descending stroke of the Latin letter has fully developed by the 3rd century BC, as seen in the
Tomb of the Scipios sarcophagus inscriptions of that era. From , the letter would be written with its loop fully closed, assuming the shape formerly taken by .
Cursive , in
De divina proportione (1509) The minuscule form developed through several variations on the capital form. Along with Latin minuscule writing in general, it developed ultimately from
Roman cursive via the
uncial script of Late Antiquity into the
Carolingian minuscule of the 9th century. In handwriting, it was common not to close the bottom of the loop but continue into the leg, saving an extra pen stroke. The loop-leg stroke shortened into the simple arc used in the Carolingian minuscule and until today. A calligraphic minuscule , known as
r rotunda , was used in the sequence , bending the shape of the to accommodate the bulge of the as in , as opposed to . Later, the same variant was also used where followed other lower case letters with a rounded loop towards the right, such as with , , , as well as to write the geminate as . Use of
r rotunda was mostly tied to
blackletter typefaces, and the glyph fell out of use along with blackletter fonts in English language contexts mostly by the 18th century.
Insular script used a minuscule which retained two downward strokes, but which did not close the loop, known as the
Insular r ; this variant survives in the
Gaelic type popular in Ireland until the mid-20th century, but has become largely limited to a decorative function. ==Use in writing systems==