à(lowercase: ÃÂ, Latin alphabet), known as crossed D or dyet, is a letter formed from the base character D/d overlaid with a crossbar. Crossing was used to create eth (ð), but eth has an uncial as its base whereas àis based on the straight-backed roman d, like in the Sámi languages and Vietnamese. Crossed d is a letter in the alphabets of several languages and is sometimes used in linguistics as a substitute for /ð/, the voiced dental fricative.
In the lowercase, the crossbar is usually drawn through the ascender, but when used as a phonetic symbol it may be preferred to draw it through the bowl, in which case it is known as a barred d. In some African languages' orthographies, such as that of Moro, the barred d is preferred.
In the uppercase, the crossbar normally crosses just the left stem, but in Vietnamese and Moro it may sometimes cross the entire letter.
The DE ligature should not be confused with the ÃÂ. That ligature was used stylistically in pre-19th century Spanish as a contraction for , as a D with an E superimposed. For example, <span lang="es" style="font-variant-ligatures: historical-ligatures">DE</span> .
A lowercase appeared alongside a lowercase retroflex D in a 1982 revision of the African reference alphabet. This revision of the alphabet eliminated uppercase forms, so there was no conflict between and .
The letter , which is not used in standard Finnish, became used in Kven language texts in the early 2020s, with its users as of March 2025 including the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection ( ), NRK (e.g. '), and Kainun Institutti (e.g. ').
was used in Medieval Latin to mark abbreviations of words containing the letter d. For example, could stand for "of the heirs". Similar crossbars were added to other letters to form abbreviations.
is used to write the voiced alveolo-palatal affricate, , similar to the in "jam".
was introduced by the Serbian philologist ÃÂuro DaniÃÂiàin 1878 for use in Serbo-Croatian in his Dictionary of the Croatian or Serbian Language, replacing the older digraphs and . DaniÃÂiàmodeled the letter after the Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon letter eth, albeit representing a different sound. In 1892 it was officially introduced in Croatian and Slavonian schools (in the Habsburg Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia where the Croatian language was official) and so definitively added to GajâÂÂs Latin alphabet. The letter thereafter gradually entered daily use, spreading throughout Serbo-Croatian and then to Macedonian (its Latin transliterations are heavily influenced by Serbo-Croatian from the Yugoslav period).
is today considered a distinct letter, and is placed between Dà ¾ and E in alphabetical order. Its Cyrillic equivalent is àÃÂ. Its partial equivalent in Macedonian is àà(because only some dialects contain the sound). When a true is not available or desired, it is transcribed as in modern Serbo-Croatian, and as in Macedonian. The use of in place of used to be more common in Serbo-Croatian texts, but it is falling out of practice.
In the present-day orthographies of Northern Sámi, Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi, represents the fricative . It is considered a distinct letter and placed between D and E in alphabetical order.
In the Vietnamese alphabet, represents a voiced alveolar implosive () or, according to Thompson (1959), a preglottalized voiced alveolar stop (). An unadorned in Vietnamese represents either (Hanoian) or (Saigonese).
is the seventh letter of the Vietnamese alphabet, after and before . Traditionally, digraphs and trigraphs like and were considered letters as well, making the eighth letter. is a letter in its own right, rather than a ligature or letter-diacritic combination; therefore, ÃÂá would come after dù in any alphabetical listing.
The Vietnamese alphabet was formally described for the first time in the 17th-century text , attributed to a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, possibly Francisco de Pina or Filipe Sibin. This passage about the letter ÃÂ was later incorporated into Alexandre de Rhodes' seminal :
On older typewriters, was located where would be in the French AZERTY layout. Alternatively, a hyphen can be overstruck onto a D.
On computers without support for a Vietnamese character set or Unicode, is encoded as <code>DD</code> and as <code>dd</code> according to the Vietnamese Quoted-Readable standard. Vietnamese computer users typically input as in the Telex and VIQR input methods or as in the VNI input method. In the absence of an input method, the and Microsoft Windows Vietnamese keyboard layouts map ZA0-09 ( on a U.S. keyboard) to , or when holding down . The Windows layout also maps ZA0-11 () to â«.
Other modes of communication also have dedicated representations of . In Vietnamese Braille, it is , which corresponds to in French Braille. In the Vietnamese manual alphabet, is produced by touching the thumb to the index finger. In Morse code, it is rendered â ÷ ÷ â ÷ ÷, corresponding to Telex's "DD".
The Spanish language used as a ligature of the word (). It is rarely typed, but it was commonly used on signs and in handwritten text, especially in Old Spanish.
The lowercase àis used in some phonetic transcription schemes to represent a voiced dental fricative (English th in this). Eth (ð) is more commonly used for this purpose, but the crossed d has the advantage of being able to be typed on a standard typewriter, by overlaying a hyphen over a d.
A minuscule form of the letter, ÃÂ, is the symbol of the ÃÂá»Âng, the currency of Vietnam, by a 1953 decree by Há» ChàMinh. The South Vietnamese ÃÂá»Âng, on the other hand, was symbolized "ÃÂ.", in majuscule. In Unicode, the Vietnamese ÃÂá»Âng symbol is properly represented by , but is often used instead. In Vietnamese, the ÃÂá»Âng sign is written after the amount in superscript, often underlined.
The uppercase form, ÃÂ, is used as the currency symbol for the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
Dispersity is represented by the symbol ÃÂ, and is a measure of the heterogeneity of sizes of molecules or particles in a mixture, referring to either molecular mass or degree of polymerization.
In Japanese handwriting, the letter D may be written as to clearly distinguish it from the letter O or the digit 0. This is similar to writing Z or 7 with a bar to distinguish them from 2 and 1 respectively.
In Unicode, both crossed d and barred d are considered glyph variants of U+0111.
Unicode has a distinct code point for the visually very similar capital eth, ÃÂ, U+00D0, which can lead to confusion.
As part of WGL4, ÃÂ and ÃÂ can be expected to display correctly even on older Windows systems.