De (Д д; italic: Д д) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced dental stop pronounced as //d̪//, like the pronunciation of (d) in "door", except closer to the teeth. De is usually romanised using the Latin letter D.
The Cyrillic letter De was derived from the Greek letter Delta (Δ δ).
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was (dobro), meaning "good".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, De had a value of 4.
The major graphic difference between De and its modern Greek equivalent lies in the two descenders ("feet") below the lower corners of the Cyrillic letter. The descenders were borrowed from a Byzantine uncial shape of uppercase Delta.
De, like the Cyrillic letter El, has two typographical variants: an older variant where its top is pointed (like Delta), and a modern one (first used in mid-19th-century fonts) where it is square. Nowadays, almost all books and magazines are printed with fonts with the second variant of the letter; the first one is rather stylish and only a few popular text fonts use it (the best known example is "Baltika" designed in 1951-52 by V. G. Chiminova and others).
In italic (Russian) type, the lowercase form looks more like the lowercase Latin (d), a mirrored numeral 6 or a partial derivative symbol (∂). Southern (Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian) typography may prefer a variant that looks like a single-storey lowercase Latin (g). Cursive lowercase De has the same two shapes, but with a different distribution: for example, the g-shaped variant is a standard for schools in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus but also used for certain typefaces with OpenType features.[1]
The (Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian-Bulgarian) cursive form of capital De looks like Latin D as the printed version is not comfortable enough to be written quickly. The Serbian cursive form is closer to the shape of a numeral "2" (identical to the form sometimes used for uppercase cursive Latin Q); this form is unknown in Russia.
It most often represents the voiced dental plosive pronounced as //d//. However, word-finally and before voiceless consonants, it represents a voiceless pronounced as /[t]/. Before a palatalizing vowel, it represents pronounced as //dʲ//.
