U00FE

U+00FE, Latin Small Letter Thorn, is a Unicode code point assigned to the lowercase letter thorn used in several historical and modern Germanic orthographies. The character glyph is þ, and its uppercase counterpart is U+00DE, Latin Capital Letter Thorn (Þ). U+00FE belongs to the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080–U+00FF) and has the general category Ll (Letter, lowercase). In UTF-8 it is encoded as the two-byte sequence C3 BE, and in ISO/IEC 8859-1 and Windows-1252 it maps to the single byte FE. In HTML, it can be written as þ or þ.

History and usage: Thorn originated in the Latin script to denote the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (and historically /ð/ in some forms). It was widely used in Old English and Old Norse texts. In Middle English, the character sometimes appeared, but over time it was largely replaced by the digraph "th" in English. In modern times, thorn survives primarily in Icelandic as þ, representing the same or related dental fricative sounds in various dialectal contexts. The code point U+00FE thus encodes a letter with both historical significance and current use in Icelandic typography.

See also: Latin script letters Thorn and Latin-1 Supplement.