Thorn, or
þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the
Anglo-Saxon and
Icelandic alphabets. It was also used in
medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with
th. The letter originated from the
rune ? in the
Elder Fuþark, called
thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and
thorn or
thurs ("
giant") in the Scandinavian
rune poems, its reconstructed
Proto-Germanic name being
*Thurisaz.It has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative, like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative, like th as in the English word the. In Modern Icelandic the usage is restricted to the former. The voiced form is represented with the letter eth (Ð, ð), though eth can be unvoiced, depending on position within a sentence, in which case its IPA representation is given as ? (theta).
In its typography, the thorn is one of the few characters in the alphabets derived from the Latin where the modern lower case form has greater height than the capital in its normal (roman), non-italic form.
The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, like ð; but unlike ð, it remained in common usage through most of the Middle English period. A thorn with the ascender crossed (
) was a popular abbreviation for the word that.
