In typography and handwriting, a superior letter is a lower-case letter placed above the baseline and made smaller than an ordinary script. The style has traditionally been distinct from superscript.[how?] Formerly quite common in abbreviations, the original purpose was to make handwritten abbreviations clearly distinct from normal words. These could also be used to make the important words on signs larger. In technical terms, the superior letter can also be called the superscripted minuscule letter. In modern usage, with word processors and text entry interfaces, superscript and superior letters are produced in the same way and look identical. Their distinction would refer to their usage and not to their form.
With the advent of printing, pieces of type were cast to enable them to appear in print. These are still commonly used in French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, though their appearance in English has diminished. Not every letter in the alphabet has a piece of type cast for it as a superior letter. In the book Thinking in Type, by Alex W. White, it is stated that there are only twelve superior letters used in French and Spanish: a, b, d, e, i, l, m, n, o, r, s, and t.[1] However, a few other superior letters are also used those languages, for example in English, h is also sometimes rendered as a superior letter, or in French, superior g is used in some abbreviations (See below).
Use in French
A directional road sign in France abbreviating sur as /, Centre as C, Commercial as Comm, and Régional as R
In French, certain abbreviations[2] are written with the first letter(s) of the word they represent, followed by the final letter(s) in superscript. The superscript in this case is sometimes optional. Most commonly, this appears in the abbreviations of personal titles: Mgr (or Mgr) stands for monseigneur ('Your Grace'), Mlle (or Mlle) for mademoiselle ('Miss'), Me for maître ('Maestro'), etc. Other abbreviations containing superior letters are mdise for marchandise ('merchandise'), échce for échéance ('due date'), and Mo for métro ('subway').
When ordinal numbers are abbreviated,[3] superscript letters are generally used:
premier: 1er ('first')
vingtième siècle: XXesiècle ('twentieth century')
quatre centième: 400e ('four hundredth')
énième: Nième ('nth')
Use in Spanish
In Spanish, they are known as letras voladas ('flying letters', in Spain) or voladitas (lit.'little flying' letters). At present, these letters are usually not underlined, though underlining them is acceptable. It is ruled that a period must be added immediately before them,[4] despite the fact that this norm is often ignored.
Superior letters are used to shorten various words in order to save space: f.o (folio 'page'); titles: D.a (doña 'Lady, Ms.'); personal compound given names: M.a Cristina (María Cristina) and regular administrative expressions: imp.to (impuesto 'tax').
For singular ordinal numbers, shortened forms use the feminine (ª) and masculine (º) ordinal indicators,[5] rather than the superscript a and o, except in ordinal numbers ending in -er (only before masculine singular sustantives for ordinal numbers whose cardinal equivalent finishes in 1 and 3, except with the 11.º variant spelled undécimo).
In English, superior letters are reserved for use with ordinal numerals, as in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. However, this use is not mandatory and not always preferred: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. are also accepted abbreviations of ordinal numerals.
Previously, in English-speaking countries, abbreviations of given names were used for recordkeeping. Today, their use is very uncommon, and they are generally only found in historical records. These abbreviations sometimes employed superior letters; for example, Alexr for Alexander, Nics for Nicholas.[6]
Most typewriters for Spanish and other Romance languages had keys that could enter o and a directly, as a shorthand intended to be used primarily with ordinal numbers, such as 1.o for first.
In computing, early 8-bit character sets as code page 437 for the original IBM PC (circa 1981) also had these characters. In ISO-8859-1 Latin-1, and later in Unicode, they were assigned to and are known as U+00AA FEMININE ORDINAL INDICATOR (ª) and U+00BA MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR (º). Here, "feminine" and "masculine" refers to grammatical gender. In Spanish, Portuguese, Galician and Italian, gender is usually distinguished by the suffixes -a and -o. These ordinal indicators are now distinct from the superior o and a characters. Apart from Microsoft’s Calibri or Cambria, in most of the commonly available computer fonts today, ordinal indicators are not underlined.
One abbreviation using a superior letter, the numero sign, has been given its own character: №. Originally, this was just another use of a superior o, abbreviating numero, the word for 'number' in several Romance languages. It often appears in English, for example in № 2 pencil, for 'number-two pencil'.
Several superior letters are used in phonetic transcription systems. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses the superscript n ⁿ for nasal release, the superscript w ʷ to indicate labialized or labio-velarized consonants, the superscript h ʰ for aspirated consonants, the superscript j ʲ for palatalized consonants, the superscript gamma ᵞ for velarized consonants, the superscript turned h ᶣ for labio-palatalized consonants, the superscript reversed glottal stop for pharyngealized consonants, the superscript glottal stop is used for glottalized but pulmonic sonorants, such as [mˀ], [lˀ], [wˀ], [aˀ]. Other superscript letters are used as an alternative way to represent double articulated consonants, for example [tˢ] for [t͡s].
The Arabic alphabet, or Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual letterforms. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, with only consonants required to be written; due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad.
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 ⟨á⟩, grave ⟨à⟩, and circumflex ⟨â⟩, 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.
The system of Hebrew numerals is a quasi-decimal alphabetic numeral system using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The system was adapted from that of the Greek numerals sometime between 200 and 78 BCE, the latter being the date of the earliest archeological evidence.
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is o, plural oes.
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.
Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound.
In written languages, an ordinal indicator is a character, or group of characters, following a numeral denoting that it is an ordinal number, rather than a cardinal number. In English orthography, this corresponds to the suffixes -st, -nd, -rd, -th in written ordinals.
The bilabial clicks are a family of click consonants that sound like a smack of the lips. They are found as phonemes only in the small Tuu language family, in the ǂ’Amkoe language of Botswana, and in the extinct Damin ritual jargon of Australia. However, bilabial clicks are found paralinguistically for a kiss in various languages, including integrated into a greeting in the Hadza language of Tanzania, and as allophones of labial–velar stops in some West African languages, as of /mw/ in some of the languages neighboring Shona, such as Ndau and Tonga.
Khmer script is an abugida (alphasyllabary) script used to write the Khmer language, the official language of Cambodia. It is also used to write Pali in the Buddhist liturgy of Cambodia and Thailand.
The numero sign or numero symbol, № (also represented as Nº, No̱, No. or no.), is a typographic abbreviation of the word number(s) indicating ordinal numeration, especially in names and titles. For example, using the numero sign, the written long-form of the address "Number 22 Acacia Avenue" is shortened to "№ 22 Acacia Ave", yet both forms are spoken long.
Scribal abbreviations or sigla are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Norse.
The degree symbol or degree sign, °, is a glyph or symbol that is used, among other things, to represent degrees of arc, hours, degrees of temperature or alcohol proof. The symbol consists of a small superscript circle.
He is the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician hē 𐤄, Hebrew hē ה, Aramaic hē 𐡄, Syriac hē ܗ, and Arabic hāʾ ه. Its sound value is the voiceless glottal fricative.
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.
Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Spanish punctuation uniquely includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩⟨¡⟩.
ISO 11940 is an ISO standard for the transliteration of Thai characters, published in 1998 and updated in September 2003 and confirmed in 2008. An extension to this standard named ISO 11940-2 defines a simplified transcription based on it.
In Unicode and the UCS, a compatibility character is a character that is encoded solely to maintain round-trip convertibility with other, often older, standards. As the Unicode Glossary says:
A character that would not have been encoded except for compatibility and round-trip convertibility with other standards
A subscript or superscript is a character that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, while superscripts are above. Subscripts and superscripts are perhaps most often used in formulas, mathematical expressions, and specifications of chemical compounds and isotopes, but have many other uses as well.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
