þus

þus is the Old English adverb meaning "thus" or "in this way." It appears in early medieval manuscripts as a direct equivalent of the modern English word and is written with the thorn letter, þ, followed by the letters u and s.

Orthography and pronunciation: The thorn þ represented the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ in Old English. Therefore, þus would have been pronounced roughly as /θus/. In the Middle English period, thorn gradually fell out of use and was replaced by the digraph "th," giving the modern spelling thus. The pronunciation of the modern word tends to be /ðʌs/ or /θʌs/ depending on dialect and allophony.

Etymology and cognates: þus is a Germanic word found in Old English with cognates in other Germanic languages. Its closest contemporary cognate is the Dutch word dus, meaning "thus" or "therefore." The form reflects the shared Germanic heritage of words signaling manner or consequence, even as exact spellings diverged across languages.

Modern usage and significance: Today, the thorn spelling þus is of primarily historical and philological interest. The word survives in modern English only in its standardized form, thus, which has replaced the Old English spelling in contemporary writing. Scholarly discussions of Old English language and literature frequently cite þus as an example of thorn-based orthography and early Germanic syntax.

In typography and encoding, thorn remains a distinct character with dedicated Unicode code points (Þ U+00DE for uppercase and þ U+00FE for lowercase) and is still used in Icelandic orthography as well as in linguistic and historical contexts.