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It has the sound of either a voiceless interdental fricative, like th (such as in the English word "thick") or the voiced form (such as in English "the"), though in Icelandic the usage is restricted to the former, and the voiced form is represented in the letter ð.

It was used in writing Middle English before the invention of the printing press: William Caxton, the first printer in England, brought with him type made in Continental Europe, which lacked thorn, yogh, and eth. He substituted "y" in place of thorn, and in fact "y" is still often substituted for it on gravestones and quaint store signs: "ye olde candies shoppe" should be read as "THe olde....", although it is jocularly or mistakenly pronounced "yee". This was not an arbitrary choice of Caxton's; in some manuscripts of the earlier 1400s (e.g. The Boke of Margery Kempe ) the letters "y" and thorn were identical.

While very rare, it is used infrequently in some modern English word games to replace the "th" with a single letter.

See also: Edh (Ð)For an overview of letters that look similar to see D (disambiguation (capital lower-case (or eth e or edh Faroese: edd is a letter used in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and present-day Icelandic and Faroese. The letter had its origin as a d with a cross-stro, Yogh (Ȝ), Wynn (Ƿ)Wynn is a letter in the old English alphabet that came from a rune (ᚹ) by the same name. It was used to represent the sound /w/. In written Old English and Middle English it was borrowed to represent the same sound, as the letter W was a later inve

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• Michael EversonMichael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an expert in the writing systems of the world. He is active in supporting minority-language communities, especially in the fields of character encoding standardization and internationalization. He is one of the co's essay On the status of the Latin letter þorn and of its sorting order