The r rotunda "rounded r," is an old letter variant found in full script-like typefaces, especially blackletter

Blackletter

Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...

s. Between the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

 and today, many ways of writing alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...

ical characters were lost. Besides a variety of ligatures

Ligature (typography)

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms", where the specific shape of a letter depends on...

, conjoined letters, scribal abbreviations, swash

Swash (typography)

A swash is a typographical flourish on a glyph, like an exaggerated serif.Capital swash characters, which extended to the left, were historically often used to begin sentences. There were also minuscule swash characters, which came either extending to the left, to begin words, or to the right to...

 characters, and the "long s

Long s

The long, medial or descending s is a form of the minuscule letter s formerly used where s occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example "ſinfulneſs" . The modern letterform was called the terminal, round, or short s.-History:The long s is derived from the old Roman cursive...

" with its own ligatures, one was the "r rotunda". Like many of the practices listed, this variant form of that letter was originally devised either to save space while writing on expensive parchment or for aesthetic reasons. It became popular among typesetters, providing a visual diversity of form and beauty, particularly in blackletter typefaces.

This "r"-shape was used at first only after the letter "o". It progressed to follow any letter that ended in a curved stroke. Hence, in blackletter, it may follow the letters "b", "o", "p", or "d", which provides the missing "half" of the "r". Often it was used after "d", for in many of those old typefaces the vertical stroke of that letter was curled to the left (as it still is in the Icelandic

Icelandic language

Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...

 letter "ð

Ð

A Latin capital letter D with a stroke through its vertical bar is the uppercase form of several different letters:*D with stroke , used in Vietnamese, some South Slavic , Moro and Sami languages...

"). It never began a word. This symbol came in several different shapes, all of which were of x-height

X-height

In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the distance between the baseline and the mean line in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the letter x in the font , as well as the u, v, w, and z...

.

Original form

The shape of the letter used in blackletter

Blackletter

Blackletter, also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to well into the 17th century. It continued to be used for the German language until the 20th century. Fraktur is a notable script of this type, and sometimes...

 scripts Textualis as well as Rotunda

Rotunda (script)

The Rotunda is a specific medieval blackletter script. It originates in Carolingian minuscule. Sometimes, it is not considered a blackletter script, but a script on its own. It was used mainly in southern Europe.-Characteristics:...

 is reminiscent of “half an r”, namely, the right side of the Roman capital “R”; it looks a bit like an Arabic numeral

Arabic numerals

Arabic numerals or Hindu numerals or Hindu-Arabic numerals or Indo-Arabic numerals are the ten digits . They are descended from the Hindu-Arabic numeral system developed by Indian mathematicians, in which a sequence of digits such as "975" is read as a numeral...

 “2”.

This character form also played a part in a common scribal abbreviation

Abbreviation

An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase...

. The tail was extended to the right and a cross-bar was put through it, producing a figure very much like the ancient Greek symbol for the planet Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...

. This stood for the Latin syllable as well as the genitive plural terminations, and . This abbreviation character could follow any other character.

Other forms

Also found in Textura manuscripts is a very narrow second variant, in the form of one solid diamond atop another atop a vertical stroke.

One form used in blackletter looked quite similar to the currency sign for the British pound

Pound sterling

The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...

 without the crossbars. But it had no loop at the top and its understroke was quite short.

Another form found in German typefaces was a variant of that previous, with the part of an "s" that looks like an integral sign atop something rather like a "c". This one can be found used also as the second "r" of a pair and following "e".

Italic form

A fifth form, used in the eighteenth century in some French italic type

Italic type

In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...

faces, was a derivative either of the Schrift

Sütterlin

Sütterlinschrift , or Sütterlin for short, is the last widely used form of the old German blackletter handwriting . In Germany, the old German cursive script developed in the 16th century, replacing the Gothic handwriting at the same time that bookletters developed into the Fraktur typeface...

 form of the minuscule "r", or of similar typefaces used elsewhere. Its form was of a backwards "J" set just after the same shape rotated 180 degrees. They were separated by a space smaller than the stroke width between them, and the whole character was slanted as though it were cursive. As this typeface had the "d" that curved to the left, it was used after that character as well. By this time, though, the character was the same width as a regular "r", so it was maintained because it appeared to its users to have some elegance, or to remind them of prestigious old calligraphy.

Demise of the r rotunda

Usage of the letter form was never widespread except in blackletter scripts, so it fell out of use in English during the 16th century as roman scripts became predominant. Modern cursive

Cursive

Cursive, also known as joined-up writing, joint writing, or running writing, is any style of handwriting in which the symbols of the language are written in a simplified and/or flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing easier or faster...

 scripts use a letter r that has a resemblance to the r rotunda.

Encodings

As per Unicode 5.1 the encodings are and .

The letter was proposed to be added to Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

. Before, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative

Medieval Unicode Font Initiative

In digital typography, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative is a project which aims to coordinate the encoding and display of special characters in medieval texts written in the Latin alphabet, which are not encoded as part of Unicode....

 had allocated it in the Private Use Area of medievalist fonts at U+F20E and U+F22D. Since the characters are available in Unicode, MUFI recommends that the Unicode code points are used, not the PUA code points.