ashsymbol

Ashsymbol, commonly known as ash or the ash letter, refers to the Latin-script letter formed by the ligature of the letters a and e. In modern character encoding it appears as two forms: uppercase Æ and lowercase æ. The name derives from the ligature’s shape and its traditional role as a single phonetic unit in certain orthographies.

Historically, ash was used as a distinct letter in Old English and in some Insular alphabets, where it represented a front vowel sound often transcribed as /æ/. In later European alphabets, notably Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, Æ/æ remains a standard vowel character with its own place in the alphabet, rather than a digraph of separate letters.

In contemporary usage, ash is less common in English outside of linguistic, philological, or historical contexts. It remains a regular character in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and related orthographies, where it can appear in a wide range of everyday words. When teaching or transcribing these languages, the character is treated as a single letter with its own alphabetical order.

Encoding and typography: The ash character is widely supported in Unicode, with uppercase Æ (U+00C6) and lowercase æ (U+00E6). In HTML, it can be written as Æ or æ. The visual rendering may vary by font, as some typefaces show a single ligature glyph while others render it as the separate letters a and e.

See also: ligature, digraph, æ, Anglo-Saxon alphabet.