Æ, the Ae Symbol: Danish Letter, Latin Ligature, Cat Vowel

Is the ae symbol a letter or a ligature?

The ae symbol is both a letter and a ligature, and where you meet it tells you which. To Unicode, æ is one character. UnicodeData.txt (opens in a new tab) gives U+00E6 no decomposition, so no software can split it into a and e.

The Latin-1 code chart (opens in a new tab) still prints its old name, latin small ligature ae, next to the English name ash. It names the places the character is used: Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Old English, French and IPA.

Those places give the character three jobs, so the æ symbol meaning depends on where you met it. Wiktionary's Norwegian entry for æ (opens in a new tab) tells the story. The shape began as a Latin ligature, a join of a and e. Danish and Norwegian made it a letter, filed after z and never as ae. English and Latin kept it as a ligature. Phonetics took it over as the symbol of one vowel.

Where you met æ	What it is there	How to read it	If you cannot type it
A Nordic word: Næstved, Reykjanesbær	a letter of the alphabet	it depends on the language; see the next table	copy it, since Nordic rules treat ae as two other letters
An English word from Latin or Greek: Cæsar, encyclopædia	a ligature of a and e	usually the ee of see	write ae, or e in American spelling
A Latin phrase in French: curriculum vitæ, ex æquo	a ligature, a lettre double in French	é, as in thé	keep it joined; the OQLF says never split it
Old English: æsc, Æthelred	the Old English letter ash	the vowel of cat, short or long	keep æ, as texts that quote Old English do
A pronunciation in slashes: /kæt/	an IPA symbol	the vowel of cat	keep æ; plain-text phonetic schemes such as SAMPA write it as an opening brace

The Nordic places in the first row come from the facts on this page, and the steps further down show how to type æ on each device. The rest of the table follows Wiktionary's entries for æ, Cæsar (opens in a new tab) and æsc (opens in a new tab), and the OQLF note on French quoted below. Swedish and German write ä where Danish and Norwegian write æ. The a with umlaut page compares the two letters, so this page does not.

How do you pronounce the ae symbol in each language?

Ae symbol pronunciation is fixed only in the IPA. The IPA chart (opens in a new tab) of the International Phonetic Association places æ among the front unrounded vowels, just above the open a. Wiktionary names it the near-open front unrounded vowel. It is the vowel of cat. The letter and the ligature are another matter.

The same verb, to learn, shows the spread across the Nordic languages. Each row is Wiktionary's transcription.

Where	Word	Wiktionary IPA	Is the æ the vowel of cat?
English, as an IPA symbol	cat	/ˈkæt/	yes, by definition
Old English	æsc, ash tree	/æʃ/	yes
Norwegian Bokmål	lære, to learn	/læː.rɛ/	yes, long, as it usually is before r
Danish	lære, to learn	[ˈlɛːɐ], also [ˈlæːɐ]	mostly nearer to the e of bed
Faroese	læra, to learn	[ˈlɛaːɹa]	no: a glide from e to a
Icelandic	læra, to learn	[ˈlaiːra]	no: a diphthong close to English eye
Ligurian	æ, you have	/ɛː/	no: an open e
English, as a ligature	Caesar	/ˈsiːzə/	no: the ee of see
French, as a ligature	curriculum vitæ	é, as in thé	no

The rows come from Wiktionary's entries for cat (opens in a new tab), lære (opens in a new tab), læra (opens in a new tab), æ and Caesar (opens in a new tab), with the French row from the OQLF. The Norwegian usage note explains the Bokmål row. Before r, æ is generally /æ/ or long /æː/. Elsewhere it often sounds like e, and that varies by dialect.

So a dictionary that prints /æ/ means the vowel of cat. A Danish or Icelandic word spelled with æ may not contain that vowel at all. Even in English the vowel moves. Wiktionary gives ash (opens in a new tab) as /æʃ/ in General American and /aʃ/ in Standard Southern British.

Why is æ called ash?

The name comes from Old English. The letter took its name from a rune, ᚫ, called æsc, the ash tree. That is why English calls æ the ash letter as well as the ae letter.

Wiktionary's entries for æsc and ᚫ (opens in a new tab) give the rune the sound /æ/ or /æː/. Æsc is also the name of the Latin letter, and modern English ash, the tree, descends from it. Unicode encodes the rune on its own as U+16AB RUNIC LETTER AESC, in the Runic chart (opens in a new tab).

Old English names keep the letter, and Æthelred is one of the given names listed near the top of this page. Wiktionary's entry for Æthelred (opens in a new tab) traces it to Old English Æþelræd, noble counsel, and calls Æthelred an archaic spelling of Ethelred.

English says the name /ˈæθ.əlˌɹɛd/, with the vowel of cat, or /ˈɛθ.əlˌɹɛd/. In names from Old English the æ still sounds like ash. In names from Latin, like Cæsar, it does not.

Which languages once wrote æ and dropped it?

The ae symbol survived as a letter only in the Nordic languages. Elsewhere it faded. Wiktionary's Norwegian entry for æ says the Latin ligature came into medieval Scandinavian writing with the Latin alphabet. Danish and Norwegian then made it a letter of its own. Other languages that once wrote it went another way.

Language	What became of æ	What Wiktionary records
Danish, Norwegian	kept as a letter	an independent letter, not a ligature
Old Swedish	a letter, said [æː]	a letter of the Old Swedish alphabet
Swedish today	dropped	historical and now obsolete, replaced by a, e and ä
German	dropped	an obsolete form of ä, used until about 1700 and very rarely since
Latin	stayed a ligature	a join of a and e, also written ae or ę
English	faded out	rare or archaizing by the mid 20th century

All rows come from the language sections of Wiktionary's entry for æ. Two rows matter for old documents. A German text from before about 1700 may write æ where today's spelling has ä. A Swedish æ in an old book is a historical spelling, not the Danish or Norwegian letter.

Should English write æ, ae or e?

Today, English writes the ae symbol as ae or e. Wiktionary's usage note for the English letter æ says the ligature was common in words like mediæval and dæmon. It became rare or archaizing by the mid 20th century. Commonwealth English now usually splits the ae ligature into ae, and American English replaces it with e.

Spelled with æ	Wiktionary's label	Spelled today	How English says the æ
encyclopædia	dated spelling	encyclopaedia, encyclopedia	ee: /ɪnˌsaɪ.kləˈpi(ː).di.ə/
mediæval	dated spelling	medieval	ee: /ˌmɛd.iˈiː.vəl/
dæmon	dated spelling	daemon	ee or ay: /ˈdiː.mən/, /ˈdeɪmən/
Cæsar	alternative spelling	Caesar	ee: /ˈsiːzə/
Æthelred	archaic spelling	Ethelred	the vowel of cat, or the e of bed

The labels come from Wiktionary's entries for encyclopædia (opens in a new tab), mediæval (opens in a new tab), dæmon (opens in a new tab), Cæsar and Æthelred. The sounds come from the entries for the modern spellings, such as encyclopaedia (opens in a new tab).

Searching for the old spelling is another question. We tested it on 2026-10-09 in Node.js v26.0.0, which runs ICU 78.3 with CLDR 48 data. The comparison used base strength, the setting that ignores case and accents.

Search rules	Does Caesar match Cæsar?	Does encyclopaedia match encyclopædia?
English, French, German	yes	yes
Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Icelandic, Swedish	no	no

Under the Nordic rules, æ is a letter with its own place, as the Danish (opens in a new tab) and Icelandic (opens in a new tab) collation charts show, so it can never equal a plus e.

Stripping accents does not help either. In the same test, decomposing and dropping the marks turned café into cafe but left Cæsar as it was, because æ has nothing to decompose. If your search must match both spellings, store ae as an extra search term.

Which French words keep the æ ligature?

French keeps the ae symbol in a short list of Latin words and phrases. The OQLF, the Québec office for the French language, calls æ and œ lettres doubles in its note on writing and saying them (opens in a new tab). It says the joined vowels must never be separated, in small letters or in capitals.

Its list of words with æ: ad vitam æternam, cæcum, curriculum vitæ, et cætera, ex æquo and intuitu personæ. The note adds that et cetera, without the ligature, is the more frequent spelling of et cætera. The joined a and e is said é, as in thé.

Not every a beside an e is a ligature. The OQLF points out that aérien and aéroport keep two separate vowels.

The OQLF also notes a technical gap. The Latin-1 character set, an ISO standard the OQLF describes as the default for writing on the Internet, has æ but no œ. The Unicode chart agrees: æ sits in the Latin-1 block at U+00E6, while œ is listed only as a cross-reference to U+0153. Because CLDR's French letter set includes æ, French appears in the language list below, next to the Nordic languages.