What is Thorn (letter)?
'''Thorn''' or '''þorn''' ('''Þ''', '''þ''') is a letter in the [[Old English]] and other languages. The letter originated from the symbol ᚦ in the [[Elder Futhark|Elder Fuþark]] and was called ''thorn'' in [[Anglo-Saxon runes|Anglo-Saxon]] and the Scandinavian rune. Thorn looks like the [[Archaic Greece|archaic Greek]] [[Greek alphabet|letter]] [[Sho (letter)|sho]] (ϸ), although the two are not related. [[Icelandic language|Icelandic]] is the only surviving language which uses the letter þ. Thorn is pronounced like the sound of ''th'', as in the English word ''thick''. In some cases, it makes a sound similar to ''th'' as in the English word ''the''. Modern Icelandic usually represents this sound with the letter [[Eth (letter)|eth]] instead. The lowercase thorn character is unusual in that it has both an ascender (the tall part at the top of the character) and a descender (the part of the character below the line it is written on). [[Category:Latin letters]]