D in Different Fonts

From a door to a D

The Phoenician letter daleth meant “door”, and it was drawn as a triangle or a door-like flap. The Greeks kept the triangle as delta (Δ), which is why “delta” still means a triangular river mouth. The Romans rounded one side and produced the D we use: a straight stem with a single bowl.

Lowercase d grew out of Roman cursive writing, where the bowl shrank and the stem extended above it. Uncial manuscripts often curved that stem back to the left, a shape you can still see in some decorative fonts and in the bold gothic 𝖉.

A rare letter with no Unicode gaps

Many letters have at least one styled form that Unicode borrowed from the older Letterlike Symbols block. D isn’t one of them. Every mathematical alphabet has its own native D:

So a styled D will match the letters around it in any font that supports the block. The bold text generator shows the serif 𝐃 and sans 𝗗 versions in full words. The double-struck lowercase 𝕕 is sometimes used in maths for the differential d, a niche use that doesn’t affect how it pastes.

For writing D by hand, including the looped cursive capital that often confuses learners, see the cursive D page.

D and its three twins

D is part of a family of letters that are rotations and reflections of each other: b, d, p, q. This is why flip styles are so easy to build for D and why they’re easy to misread:

• Upside down: d becomes p, and capital D becomes ᗡ (a Canadian Syllabics character), since there’s no turned capital D in common fonts.
• Mirror: d becomes b, and capital D again uses ᗡ.

This symmetry also matters for accessibility: people with dyslexia commonly report confusing b and d, and styles that change the shape further can make that worse. The fancy text accessibility guide has more on choosing readable styles.

D in the symbol styles

The look-alike alphabets pull D-shaped characters from all over Unicode, and a few of them are real letters with their own sounds:

• Đ (currency style) is the Latin D with stroke used in Vietnamese and Croatian. The Vietnamese currency sign is actually ₫, so this isn’t a currency symbol at all.
• ᗪ (Asian and Tribal styles) is from Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.
• Ꭰ (Cherokee style) is the Cherokee syllable “a”, not a d.
• ↁ in faux Cyrillic is an archaic Roman numeral form for 5,000.
• ᛞ (runic) is the Elder Futhark rune dagaz, which stood for /d/, so the runic choice is a historical match.

None of these normalize back to a plain D, unlike the bold or script versions, so a search box or username filter may not read them as D.

Small and tiny D

• Small caps: ᴅ (U+1D05), from the Phonetic Extensions block.
• Superscript: ᴰ and ᵈ, both available.
• Subscript: none. A styled subscript word with a d in it will show one full-size letter.

Frequency

D is about 4.3% of letters in English text, mostly thanks to “and” and past-tense endings like -ed. Because so many words end in d, it’s a letter where a mismatched style shows at the end of a word rather than the start.