The letter N in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 1, 3, 4 and 5. n is d plus dot 3 and is one of the busier cells; readers usually recognise it by the gap at dot 2 rather than by counting.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and N is part of the family that starts with d. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. Learning the family together is far faster than learning N on its own, because one shape gives you three letters. The braille alphabet chart shows every family in one place.

Where N turns up in Grade 2

Standing on its own with spaces either side, N is not a letter at all — it is the whole word “not”. Inside a longer word it goes back to being an ordinary n. That is the rule beginners trip on most: not is a single cell, but the n in a word like “not” is just a letter.

A contraction is one cell doing the work of two or more letters, which is why a Grade 2 page is roughly a quarter shorter than the same text in Grade 1. The complete Grade 2 reference lists all of them with the position rules that govern when they may be used.

Writing a capital N

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital N is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from N by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with N, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.