Д д — the Russian cursive letter дэ

How to write it

1. Step 1up-stroke from the baseline
2. Step 2round the bowl anticlockwise
3. Step 3descend below the line
4. Step 4close the loop, exit right

Another look-alike

History

Lowercase д is one of the letters most likely to trip up a reader trained on the printed alphabet. In print it is a broad, flat-footed shape. Written by hand, its looped descender gives it an outline that reads as a Latin g to an eye expecting the printed form — a genuinely different letter, not a stylistic variant of the same one.

Russian cursive as a whole was developed during the 18th century on the base of the earlier Cyrillic tachygraphic writing known as skoropis ("rapid or running script"), which was itself the 14th–17th-century chancery hand descended from the earlier Cyrillic bookhand scripts. Skoropis is described as having a pronounced calligraphic character, roundness of its letters, and a large number of strokes, ligatures and abbreviations — the running hand that modern Russian cursive, д included, comes out of.

The reform of Russian orthography, decreed by the People's Commissariat of Education in December 1917 and formalised by the Soviet of People's Commissars in October 1918, did not touch the shape of д. It touched which words д is allowed to end. Before the reform, the "hard sign" ъ was written after any word-final hard consonant as a silent marker — Рыбинскъ, not Рыбинск. The reform made that final ъ obsolete, so a word ending in a hard д (or any other hard consonant) lost the letter that used to trail it. д has stood, unmarked, at the end of far more words since 1918 than it did before.

Uppercase Д is the more forgiving half of the pair. Written by hand it typically stands on two strokes that reach the baseline, often with an entry loop swung in from the left, and once a reader has seen it once it is not easily mistaken for the Latin D or anything else.