Lower groupsign
The “con-” prefix in braille
One cell for the three letters “con” when they open a word — and something else entirely anywhere else.
Dots 2-5
Unicode ⠒ — written entirely in the lower part of the cell
How to recognise it
Dots 2 and 5 — the same cell as the doubled c and as the colon, doing a third job. At the front of a word it stands for the whole prefix con-, three letters in one cell, which makes it one of the biggest savings in the code.
The same cell says other things
This is what makes the lower signs hard, and it is not a flaw in the code — there are sixty-three possible cells and far more than sixty-three things to write, so the busiest shapes do several jobs. Position is the whole of the distinction: con is read where the rules below allow it, and one of these everywhere else.
It has to open the word
A lower sign at the start of a word is a prefix. Anywhere else the same cell is punctuation, so “con” in the middle or at the end of a word is spelled out letter by letter — which is why the words in the second table below look longer than you would expect.
Several spellings begin with these letters without being the prefix at all. The standard lists which letters may follow, and this engine follows that list — “cone” is the case to remember.
It is the letter c moved down a row
Take the cell for c and slide every dot down one place — dot 1 to dot 2, dot 4 to dot 5 — and you have this sign. Every lower sign in braille is built that way, which is the reason the family is quicker to learn than eight unrelated shapes would be: you already know all of them, one row up. Most punctuation marks come from the same shift.
How often you will meet it
Of the 5,000 most common English words, 88 words use this sign. That is worth knowing before you spend time on it: the eight lower signs are not equally useful, and they range from 150 of those words down to 3. This one is at the common end — you will meet it constantly, and it repays drilling.
The contraction list ranks the whole of Grade 2 the same way.
Words that use it
Every one of these is shorter in Grade 2 than in Grade 1. They were not chosen by hand: each was taken from the reference implementation's own output for the most common English words, and the build checks that this site still writes them the same way.
| Word | In braille (Grade 2) | Grade 1 | Grade 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| contact | 7 cells | 5 cells | |
| control | 7 cells | 5 cells | |
| content | 7 cells | 4 cells | |
| conference | 10 cells | 5 cells | |
| construction | 12 cells | 7 cells |
Words where it is written out instead
These contain the same letters and do not use the sign. Reading why is the fastest way to learn the rule, because each one fails it for a different reason.
| Word | Written as | Why |
|---|---|---|
| second | con is in the middle here, and this sign only ever opens a word | |
| icon | and here it closes one, which is barred for the same reason | |
| cone | con at the front, but followed by an e it is not the prefix — the word is cone, not con-e |
Check your own text
Type anything into the translator with Grade 2 selected and this cell will appear wherever the rules allow it. The full contraction list covers the rest of Grade 2, and the practice drill has a contractions mode that offers the cells one dot away from this one as the wrong answers.
The “con” cell as an image
The cell is dots 2 and 5, with dots 1 and 4 empty. That empty top row is what makes a lower sign recognisable at a glance.
