The “ea” contraction in braille

How to recognise it

A single dot in the middle-left position — the emptiest cell in Grade 2, and the one most often missed under the finger. It is the same cell as the comma, and the only thing telling them apart is that this one has letters on both sides.

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: ea is read where the rules below allow it, and one of these everywhere else.

It has to have a letter on each side

Both neighbours must be letters. A lower sign at the start of a word would be indistinguishable from punctuation opening a sentence, and at the end from punctuation closing one, so the rule bars both positions outright rather than asking the reader to guess.

It is the letter a moved down a row

Take the cell for a 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, 150 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.

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.

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.