English terms with diacritical marks
The Old English Latin alphabet began to replace the Runic alphabet in the 9th century, due to the influence of Celtic Christian missionaries to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The orthography of Old English – which was entirely handwritten in its own time – was not well standardized, though it did not use all the Latin letters, and included several letters not present in the modern alphabet. When reprinted (on a printing press or computer) in modern times, an overdot is occasionally used with two Latin letters to differentiate sounds for the reader:
English alphabet
Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, ligatures are seldom used in modern English.
The ligatures "æ" and "œ" were until the 19th century (slightly later in American English) used in formal writing for certain words of Greek or Latin origin, such as "encyclopædia" and "cœlom", although such ligatures were not used in either classical Latin or ancient Greek. These are now usually rendered as "ae" and "oe" in all types of writing, although in American English, a lone "e" has mostly supplanted both (for example, "encyclopedia" for "encyclopaedia", and "maneuver" for "manoeuvre").