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The letter D is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet.
History
The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. In Semitic, Ancient Greek (Modern Greek /ð/) and Latin the letter was pronounced /d/, in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous but still maintained (see letter B). Greek letter: Δ (capital) or δ (small) (Delta).
Usage
The letter D generally takes the voiced alveolar plosive value in most languages that use the Roman alphabet, including English. Digraphs of D are rare in English, although other languages use DH or DD for a voiced dental fricative (some Celtic languages) or an aspirated voiced dental plosive (some Indo-Aryan languages), or use affricates DZ, DV, or DZH.
In Cantonese, the sound /d/ means a little bit, from the ancient use of the character 的 (in the phrase "兀的") in Chinese written language. Since 的 is no longer used in this way, Hong Kong residents invented a new character 啲 (which is not supported in many Chinese systems), or simply write D instead.
Alternate representations
Delta represents the letter D in the NATO phonetic alphabet, except in airports, to avoid confusion with Delta Air Lines, in which case it is Dixie.
In international Morse code the letter D is DahDitDit: - · ·
In Braille the letter D is represented as ⠙ (in Unicode), the dot pattern,
XX
.X
..
Computing
In Unicode the capital D is codepoint U+0044 and the lowercase d is U+0064.
The ASCII code for capital D is 68 and for lowercase d is 100; or in binary 01000100 and 01100100, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital D is 196 and for lowercase d is 132.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "D" and "d" for upper and lower case respectively.
Meanings for D
- In the atmosphere of Earth, the D layer is part of the ionosphere.
- In biochemistry, D is the symbol for aspartic acid.
- In calendars, D is often an abbreviation for the month December.
- In chemistry, D is the symbol of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
- In computing, D is the name of a programming language; see D programming language.
- In driving a motor vehicle, D (drive) designates the forward cruising gears in an automatic transmission.
- In education, D is a barely passing grade.
- In electronics, D is a standard size dry cell battery.
- In finance securities, D is the stock symbol for Dominion Resources Inc. VA
- In geometry, d is often a variable for the diameter of a circle.
- In international licence plate codes, D stands for Germany.
- In mathematics,
- In the Metric system, d, deci, is the SI prefix meaning one tenth, 10-1.
- In music, D is a note.
- In nutrition, D is a vitamin.
- In print, D Magazine is a magazine for the city of Dallas, Texas.
- In Roman numerals, D denotes 500.
- In British currency, d is an abbreviation for the pre-decimalization pence, worth 1/240th of a pound.
See also
Two-letter combinations starting with D:
Letter-digit combinations starting with D:
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