• AROUND 800 BCE, we find the Phoenicians drawing a rough triangle and calling it ‘dalet’ meaning ‘door’. Given that doors to dwellings made of soft materials are often triangular, this seems to be derived from a pictogram. The early ancient Greeks drew it with a downstroke on the right, turned the triangle into a semicircle and called it ‘delta’. When they switched their writing to run from left to right in around 500 BCE, they flipped the semicircle over. The Romans added serifs and produced the elegant thick-thin line.

d

Our ‘d’ emerges in Italian manuscripts around AD 400, perhaps as a result of turning carved letters into one penstroke, albeit with the upstroke bent to the left. The early printers of around 1500 opted for this single-loop and stroke for their lower case but made the upstroke as vertical as the one on the ‘D’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Norman French pronounced it ‘day’ and the Great Vowel Shift turned this to ‘dee’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

It’s easy to think of letters as having only one ‘value’ but the moment you listen to someone whose first language is different from your own, you start to hear subtle differences. We make the ‘d’ sound by hitting the roof of our mouth with the tip of our tongue. The further forward the tongue goes, the nearer it gets to the sound of ‘th’ in ‘them’. Indeed, many speakers of English say words like ‘the’ and ‘them’ so that they sound like ‘de’ and ‘dem’. The further back the tongue goes, the nearer it gets to the way many Indian speakers say a word like ‘dal’/‘dhal’. In a place like London, where speakers of ‘dem’ and many speakers of the ‘d’ as in ‘dhal’ brush shoulders, we should expect some changes to ‘d’. What’s more, some US speakers of English say ‘todally’, i.e. ‘voicing’ the ‘t’. I can remember being picked up for doing this in the 1950s, perhaps as a result of imitating cowboy movies. Keen-eared phoneticians have spotted aristocratic Brits like Prince Harry, or privately educated politicians like Tony Blair and George Osborne, doing the same.

‘D’ combines with all the vowels and the vowel ‘y’, with ‘r’ for ‘drab’ and ‘drizzle’, and with an ‘h’ in the loan words ‘dhoti’ and ‘dhow’. At the ends of verbs it doubles as in ‘rid, ridding’ but is single in ‘ride, riding’. It also doubles in words with short vowels like ‘muddle’ and ‘piddle’ but not with long vowels like ‘oodles of noodles’. Putting a consonant sound before a ‘d’ gives us ‘old’ (though I’m someone who pronounces this word more like ‘oh’ with a ‘d’ on the end), the shop ‘Asda’, ‘abdicate’ and ‘and’. Django Reinhardt’s name has the virtue of including two consonant combinations with ‘d’ not usually found in English: ‘dj’ and ‘dt’.

D-Day must be just about the most successful use of the name of a letter ever invented. The term ‘D-Day’ pre-exists the Normandy Landings as it was the phrase used by the military for any opening day of a major manoeuvre, just as ‘H-hour’ marked the opening hour. ‘D’ doesn’t stand for anything more significant than ‘day’.

Sound-play with ‘d’ gives us ‘dad’, ‘daddy’, ‘da’, ‘dadda’, ‘Dada’, ‘doodle’, ‘diddle’, ‘doddle’, ‘dud’, ‘dude’, ‘DD’ and ‘Didi’, ‘doo-doo’, ‘doh!’, ‘der!’, ‘duh!’, ‘fuddy-duddy’, ‘doo-be-doo-be-doo’, ‘Scooby-dooby-doo’, ‘Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle’ and ‘Doo-wah-diddy-diddy-dum-do-ee-day’.

Familiar ‘d’ expressions include ‘every dog has its day’ and ‘do as you would be done by’. In dull moments, you can try saying, ‘Ken Dodd’s dad’s dog’s died’.