The letter D in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 1, 4 and 5 form a corner opening down-right. d is f flipped horizontally, and telling those two apart is one of the first real skills in tactile reading.

D, N and Y: one shape

D is the base shape. Add dot 3 and it becomes N; add dots 3 and 6 and it becomes Y.

One row lower: the full stop

Slide every dot of D down one row — dots 1-4-5 become dots 2-5-6 — and the cell is the full stop.

D is also the digit 4

After the number sign, dots 3-4-5-6, D is read as 4 — and one number sign carries a whole run of digits, so 44 is three cells: ⠼⠙⠙. Braille numbers covers where the run ends.

Where D turns up in Grade 2

Standing alone, D is the word “do”. Inside a word it is the letter again: “door” is ⠙⠕⠕⠗.

The contraction reference gives the rules for each.

Writing a capital D

Capital D is two cells: the capital sign, dot 6, then D. A word in capitals takes the sign twice, once for the whole word: “DOOR” is ⠠⠠⠙⠕⠕⠗. Capitals covers longer runs.

Easily confused with

D differs by a single dot from C, E, G and N — the letters to drill it against.

Practice words

Words that start with D, one cell per letter in Grade 1. Where Grade 2 writes one shorter, that form follows.

In a whole book

In a count over the whole of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the letter d is printed 4,926 times. Grade 2 still writes it as its own cell 1,816 times, 36.9%. The other 3,110 are inside contractions, most often “and” (950), “ed” (919), “said” (460) and “had” (186).

The cell itself is written 2,730 times in the Grade 2 text: 1,816 as the letter, 80 as the word “do”, 697 inside shortforms and 137 as the second cell of a two-cell contraction.