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A bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a grapheme. It may be used as a diacritic to derive new letters from old ones, or simply as an addition to make a grapheme more distinct from others. It can take the form of a vertical bar, slash, or crossbar.
A stroke is sometimes drawn through the numerals 7 (horizontal overbar) and 0 (overstruck foreslash), to make them more distinguishable from the number 1 and the letter O, respectively. (In some typefaces, one or other or both of these characters are designed in these styles; they are not produced by overstrike or by combining diacritic. The normal way in most of Europe to write the number seven is with a bar. [1] )
In medieval English scribal abbreviations, a stroke or bar was used to indicate abbreviation. [2] For example, ⟨£⟩, the pound sign, is a stylised form of the letter ⟨Ꝉ⟩ (the letter ⟨L⟩ with a cross bar). [3] [lower-alpha 1]
For the specific usages of various letters with bars and strokes, see their individual articles.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨ó⟩, grave ⟨ò⟩, and circumflex ⟨ô⟩, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
A macron is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar ¯ placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) 'long' because it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the macron is used to indicate a mid-tone; the sign for a long vowel is instead a modified triangular colon ⟨ː⟩.
QWERTY is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: QWERTY. The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold via E. Remington and Sons from 1874. QWERTY became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878 and remains in ubiquitous use.
Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising twenty-nine letters but also including two additional letters found in some loanwords. The Finnish orthography strives to represent all morphemes phonologically and, roughly speaking, the sound value of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) – although some discrepancies do exist.
Estonian orthography is the system used for writing the Estonian language and is based on the Latin alphabet. The Estonian orthography is generally guided by phonemic principles, with each grapheme corresponding to one phoneme.
A caron is a diacritic mark commonly placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
The Slovene alphabet is an extension of the Latin script used to write Slovene. The standard language uses a Latin alphabet which is a slight modification of the Croatian Gaj's Latin alphabet, consisting of 25 lower- and upper-case letters:
The pound sign is the symbol for the pound unit of sterling – the currency of the United Kingdom and its associated Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories and previously of Great Britain and of the Kingdom of England. The same symbol is used for other currencies called pound, such as the Egyptian and Syrian pounds. The sign may be drawn with one or two bars depending on personal preference, but the Bank of England has used the one-bar style exclusively on banknotes since 1975.
The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography. It is based on the Latin alphabet but includes certain letters (9) with diacritics: the acute accent ; the overdot ; the tail or ogonek ; and the stroke. ⟨q⟩, ⟨v⟩, and ⟨x⟩, which are used only in foreign words, are usually absent from the Polish alphabet. Additionally, before the standardization of Polish spelling, ⟨qu⟩ was sometimes used in place of ⟨kw⟩, and ⟨x⟩ in place of ⟨ks⟩.
Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of an alphabet. It is one of the methods of collation. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is the generalization of the alphabetical order to other data types, such as sequences of numbers or other ordered mathematical objects.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨fi⟩ ; the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨st⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ were combined.
When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot refers to the glyphs "combining dot above", and "combining dot below" which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in a variety of languages. Similar marks are used with other scripts.
A ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.
AltGr is a modifier key found on many computer keyboards. It is primarily used to type special characters and symbols that are not widely used in the territory where sold, such as foreign currency symbols, typographic marks and accented letters. On a typical Windows-compatible PC keyboard, the AltGr key, when present, takes the place of the right-hand Alt key. The key at this location will operate as AltGr if a keyboard layout using AltGr is chosen in the operating system, regardless of what is engraved on the key. In macOS, the Option key has functions similar to the AltGr key.
Unicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any form of markup like HTML or TeX.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) requires specific names for the symbols and diacritics used in the alphabet.
Unicode supports several phonetic scripts and notation systems through its existing scripts and the addition of extra blocks with phonetic characters. These phonetic characters are derived from an existing script, usually Latin, Greek or Cyrillic. Apart from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), extensions to the IPA and obsolete and nonstandard IPA symbols, these blocks also contain characters from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet.
The Phonetic Symbol Guide is a book by Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw that explains the histories and uses of the symbols of various phonetic transcription conventions. It was published in 1986, with a second edition in 1996, by the University of Chicago Press. Symbols include letters and diacritics of the International Phonetic Alphabet and Americanist phonetic notation, though not of the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. The Guide was consulted by the International Phonetic Association when they established names and numerical codes for the International Phonetic Alphabet and was the basis for the characters of the TIPA set of phonetic fonts.
It is not known for certain when the horizontal line or lines, which indicate an abbreviation, first came to be drawn through the L. However, there is in the Bank of England Museum a cheque dated 7 January 1661 with a clearly discernible £ sign. By the time the Bank was founded in 1694 the £ sign was in common use.