Letter 18 of 26
The letter R in braille
R is dots 1, 2, 3 and 5.
Dots 1-2-3-5
Unicode ⠗ — U+2817
How to recognise it
Dots 1, 2, 3 and 5. r is e plus dot 3 plus dot 2, and its full left column with a single middle-right dot is a distinctive shape.
The family this letter belongs to
Braille is built from ten base shapes, and R is part of the family that starts with h. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. This family is worth knowing for what the third step produces: not a letter at all, but the “of” contraction. The braille alphabet chart shows every family in one place.
The alphabet runs out before this family does. There are only 26 letters, and the shapes in this part of the cell space went to the words English uses most instead — which is why h plus dots 3 and 6 gives you a whole word rather than a letter. The contraction reference shows the other cells that were assigned this way.
Where R turns up in Grade 2
Standing on its own with spaces either side, R is not a letter at all — it is the whole word “rather”. Inside a longer word it goes back to being an ordinary r. That is the rule beginners trip on most: rather is a single cell, but the r in a word like “run” is just a letter.
| Cell | Letters | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ar | one cell for the letters “ar” wherever they appear together | |
| er | one cell for the letters “er” wherever they appear together | |
| for | one cell for “for”, and standing alone it means “for” |
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 R
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 R 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 R 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 R, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.
run
read
right
Standing alone, R means “rather”. Inside a longer word it is just the letter r. See the contraction reference for the full list.
R in braille as an image
The cell as a picture, dots 1-2-3-5 filled and the other two positions empty — for a worksheet, a slide or a message.
