ß

ð, known as eth, is a letter of the Latin script used in several Germanic languages. It represents the voiced dental fricative /ð/, the sound found in English words such as this. In historical English orthography, ð was used alongside thorn (þ) to spell /θ/ and /ð/, but by the end of the Middle English period it was largely replaced by the digraph th.

In modern usage, ð remains a standard letter in Icelandic and Faroese. In Icelandic, it is a distinct letter and represents the /ð/ sound in native words, with its own place in the alphabet. In Faroese, ð also appears in the orthography and marks the same phoneme in the language.

Origin and encoding: The character originated in the Latin alphabet as a Latinized form of an older rune used for /ð/ in runic and early Latin-script writings. In English, the symbol disappeared from ordinary usage as the /ð/ sound came to be written with the digraph th. In computing and typography, lowercase eth is encoded as U+00F0 and uppercase ETH as U+00D0. HTML entities ð and Ð can be used in text that requires these characters.