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Thorn, or þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic alphabets. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from the rune ? in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs ("giant") in the Scandinavian rune poems, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being *Thurisaz. It has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative, like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative, like th as in the English word the. In Modern Icelandic the usage is restricted to the former. The voiced form is represented with the letter eth (Ð, ð), though eth can be unvoiced, depending on position within a sentence, in which case its IPA representation is given as ? (theta). In its typography, the thorn is one of the few characters in the alphabets derived from the Latin where the modern lower case form has greater height than the capital in its normal (roman), non-italic form. The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, like ð; but unlike ð, it remained in common usage through most of the Middle English period. A thorn with the ascender crossed ( ) was a popular abbreviation for the word that.
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