Eth Letter (ð Ð): The Voiced Th, Not Đ, Silent in Faroese

Is Ð the eth letter or a D with a stroke?

On screen you often cannot tell the eth letter from its look-alikes. Only the code point, or the small letter, settles it. The Latin-1 code chart (opens in a new tab) lists Ð as U+00D0 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ETH. Right under it, the chart points to capitals that look the same, among them Đ, U+0110, and Ɖ, U+0189.

Each one belongs to a different alphabet. The Latin Extended-A chart (opens in a new tab) files Đ as a d with a stroke, used in Croatian, Serbian, Vietnamese and Sami. The Latin Extended-B chart (opens in a new tab) files Ɖ as the African D of Ewe. Its small letter, ɖ, sits in the IPA Extensions chart (opens in a new tab) as a voiced retroflex stop.

Unicode's security data agrees that the three capitals look alike. The confusables list (opens in a new tab) defined in UTS #39 (opens in a new tab) reduces Ð, Đ and Ɖ to one skeleton: a D with a short stroke through it. A spoofing check treats them as one shape. Language-aware search does not always, as the next section shows.

Lowercase the word and the three part ways. The sounds come from Wiktionary's entries for đ (opens in a new tab) and Ɖ (opens in a new tab), and the languages from this page's facts and the charts above.

Capital	Code point	Small letter	Written in	What the small letter sounds like
Ð, eth	U+00D0	ð, U+00F0	Icelandic, Faroese, Old English, IPA	the th of this, /ð/
Đ, d with stroke	U+0110	đ, U+0111	Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Vietnamese, Sami	/d͡ʑ/ in Serbo-Croatian, [ʔɗ] in Vietnamese, /ð/ in Northern Sami
Ɖ, African D	U+0189	ɖ, U+0256	Ewe	/ɖ/, a d said with the tongue curled back

So when a capital Ð turns up in a Croatian surname or a Vietnamese town, it is most likely a slip for Đ. Neither alphabet has the eth letter: AccentPad's facts list only Faroese and Icelandic for ð. The developer card on this page shows the code point of the real eth letter, U+00F0, to compare against.

Why does Đà Lạt sometimes turn up spelled with an eth?

Because someone typed the capital of the eth letter where Vietnamese needs Đ, and the error travels with the data. The GeoNames (opens in a new tab) cities file is one place it travels: on 2026-10-09 we checked the copy AccentPad downloads, and it spells Ðà Lạt and Ðông Hà with U+00D0.

Other Vietnamese towns in the same file, such as Thủ Đức and Ba Đồn, have the correct Đ, U+0110. The places card on this page leaves the two eth spellings out. AccentPad keeps a place only when an official language of its country writes the letter, and the Vietnamese alphabet (opens in a new tab) has đ, not ð.

The slip is invisible on screen, but it changes what software does. We measured it on 2026-10-09 with the locale-aware compare in Node.js v26.0.0, which runs ICU 78.3 on CLDR 48 data. The comparison used base strength, the setting that ignores case and accents.

Question	English rules	Vietnamese rules	Croatian rules	Icelandic rules	Faroese rules
Does Đà Lạt match the eth spelling Ðà Lạt?	yes	no	no	no	yes
Does a search for Da Lat find Đà Lạt?	yes	no	no	yes	yes
Does a search for Da Lat find Ðà Lạt?	yes	yes	yes	no	yes
Does Gudrun find Guðrún?	yes	yes	yes	no	yes

Read the Vietnamese column. A user who types the correct Đà Lạt misses the record spelled with the eth capital. A user who types plain Da Lat finds the wrong record and misses the right one. Lowercasing makes it worse: in the same test, ÐÀ LẠT became ðà lạt with an Icelandic ð, while ĐÀ LẠT became đà lạt.

The Icelandic and Faroese columns show the letter's two homes disagree. Icelandic files ð as a letter of its own, right after d, as the Icelandic collation chart (opens in a new tab) lists it. So Gudrun never finds Guðrún. Under the Faroese rules, ð counted as a variant of d at this strength, like an accent on it. As a control, é matched e under English rules and did not under Icelandic rules, where é is a separate letter.

The fix for a stray eth letter is mechanical. In Vietnamese, Croatian or Bosnian text, replace every U+00D0 with U+0110 and every U+00F0 with U+0111. In Icelandic or Faroese text, do the reverse.

What sound does the eth letter stand for in IPA?

The eth letter stands for the voiced dental fricative: the th of this and breathe. The IPA chart (opens in a new tab) of the International Phonetic Association puts ð among the fricatives, beside θ, the voiceless th of thin. Wiktionary's entry for ð (opens in a new tab) gives the symbol that meaning and adds that it can also mark a softer, approximant version of the sound.

English spells both sounds th, so the eth symbol in IPA is how a dictionary tells them apart. In each pair below, one word has θ and the other has ð. All transcriptions are Wiktionary's.

Voiceless, with θ	IPA	Voiced, with ð	IPA
thin	/ˈθɪn/	this	/ðɪs/
thigh	/θaɪ/	thy	/ˈðaɪ̯/
breath	/bɹɛθ/	breathe	/bɹiːð/
teeth	/ˈtiːθ/	teethe	/tiːð/
ether	/ˈiː.θə/	either	/ˈaɪ.ðə/ or /ˈiː.ðə/

The pairs come from Wiktionary's entries for thin (opens in a new tab), this (opens in a new tab), thigh (opens in a new tab), thy (opens in a new tab), breath (opens in a new tab), breathe (opens in a new tab), teeth (opens in a new tab), teethe (opens in a new tab), ether (opens in a new tab) and either (opens in a new tab). In the breath and teeth pairs, the verb that ends in -the has ð where the noun has θ.

Old English is where the letter began. Wiktionary's entry for eth (opens in a new tab) says ð was brought into Old English for its th sound and then used without any difference from thorn, þ. Its Old English section says ð could be said [θ] or [ð]. Icelandic later split the work. Wiktionary's entry for eth says Icelandic still uses ð for the voiced sound, and its entry for þú (opens in a new tab), you, gives the thorn letter the voiceless one: [ˈθuː].

Which other letters spell the sound of the eth letter?

Greek δ, Sami đ and English th all spell the sound of the eth letter, and one phonetic alphabet swaps the symbols around. Wiktionary's entries for ð, δ (opens in a new tab) and đ give the rows below. The English row comes from Wiktionary's entry for the word this.

Writing system	Letter for the th of this	Note
IPA	ð	the voiced dental fricative
Icelandic, Osage	ð	Osage writes the eth letter in its Latin alphabet, said /ð/
Modern Greek	δ	delta, said /ð/
Northern Sami, Skolt Sami	đ	a d with a stroke, said /ð/
English	th	the same spelling as the th of thin
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet	δ	in this system ð means a tap, the IPA ɾ

The last row is a trap for anyone reading transcriptions in that system. Wiktionary records that the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, UPA for short, uses δ for the voiced dental fricative and ð for an alveolar tap. So an eth symbol in a UPA transcription is not the th of this.

The Northern Sami row closes a loop with the first section. Đ, the capital that looks like Ð, writes the same sound there. The code point still differs, and so does the small letter, đ.

Why do Icelandic and Faroese say the same ð word differently?

Because Faroese kept the eth letter but mostly dropped its sound, so how to pronounce eth depends on the language. Wiktionary's entry for eth says the letter is used in Faroese but is generally silent there. The two languages spell many words alike, so the same ð shows the split.

Word	Meaning	Icelandic	Faroese	What ð becomes in Faroese
maður	man, person	[ˈmaːðʏr]	/ˈmɛaːvʊɹ/	a v sound between the vowels
góður	good	[ˈkouːðʏr]	/ˈkɔuːwʊɹ/	a w sound
veður, veðrið	weather, the weather	veður [ˈvɛːðʏr]	veðrið [ˈvɛɡrɪ]	a g before r

The transcriptions come from Wiktionary's entries for maður (opens in a new tab), góður (opens in a new tab), veður (opens in a new tab) and veðrið (opens in a new tab). In Faroese, the ð of maður and góður is written, but what you hear between the vowels is a v or a w. Before r, in veðrið, it turns into a g.

Icelandic ð is not always voiced either. Wiktionary gives three forms of með (opens in a new tab), with: [mɛːð] in careful speech, [mɛːθ] at the end of an utterance, and [mɛ(ː)] when it is unstressed. At the end of a phrase, Icelandic ð can sound like the voiceless th of thin.

Even the name of the letter eth splits the same way. Icelandic says eð (opens in a new tab) with the th of this, while Faroese says edd (opens in a new tab) with a t. For a reader, the rule of thumb is short. In an Icelandic word, say ð as the th of this. In a Faroese word, look up the word before you say any th at all.