In William Caxton's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviated the, written with a thorn and a superscript E. By this stage, th was predominant and the use of thorn was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th-century manuscript of The Boke of Margery Kempe, it ultimately became indistinguishable from the letter Y.
The modern digraph th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century at the same time, the shape of thorn grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old wynn ( Ƿ, ƿ), which had fallen out of use by 1300, and to ancient through modern P, p). A thorn with the ascender crossed ( Ꝥ) was a popular abbreviation for the word that. This sound was regularly realised in Old English as the voiced fricative between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it the modern use of in phonetic alphabets is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe. The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, as was ð unlike ð, thorn remained in common use through most of the Middle English period. In typography, the lowercase thorn character is unusual in that it has both an ascender and a descender (other examples are lowercase Cyrillic ф and in some fonts, the Latin letter f). Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth ⟨Ð, ð⟩ however, may occur as an allophone of /θ̠/, and written ⟨þ⟩, when it appears in an unstressed pronoun or adverb after a voiced sound. However, in modern Icelandic, it is pronounced as a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative, similar to th as in the English word thick, or a (usually apical) voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative, similar to th as in the English word the. It is pronounced as either a voiceless dental fricative or the voiced counterpart of it. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated.
The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. Thorn or þorn ( Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English.
Upper- and lowercase versions of the thorn character, in sans-serif (left) and serif (right). Not to be confused with ϸ, the Graeco-Bactrian letter Sho.
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