Initial-letter contraction
“had” in braille
Two cells for the whole word, however long it is — 3 letters here, a saving of 1 cell. “had” is 106th in the 5,000-word frequency list this site measures against.
Dots 4-5-6, then dots 1-2-5
Unicode ⠸⠓ — 3 letters in two cells
How to recognise it
Three letters into two cells saves one. It is used where the a is short, as in haddock and Galahad, and not where it is long: “shadow” and “Hades” are spelled out, as the rulebook writes them.
The second cell is the letter h
The second cell is the word's own first letter — the simpler half of this list. The other nine use a groupsign instead.
Learn it with its sister
“had” and “here” are written with the same second cell. Only the prefix separates them, which means the hard work of telling them apart is done by one cell — and learning them as a set is far quicker than meeting them one at a time.
| Word | Cells | Prefix | Cells saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| had | dots 4-5-6 | 1 cell | |
| here | dots 5 | 2 cells |
Where it may appear inside a longer word
The rulebook uses it inside a longer word only where the a is short (Rules of Unified English Braille 10.7.3).
Whether the a is short is not something a translator can read off the spelling, so this site uses the sign wherever the letters occur, except in the words the rulebook itself writes without it — Chad, Hades, Hadrian, menhaden, shadow and Thaddeus — and the same words with an ending added.
From the rulebook's own examples, as this site writes them. With the sign: haddock ⠸⠓⠙⠕⠉⠅; Haddon ⠠⠸⠓⠙⠕⠝; hadji ⠸⠓⠚⠊. Without it: Chad ⠠⠡⠁⠙; menhaden ⠍⠢⠓⠁⠙⠢; shadow ⠩⠁⠙⠪.
As with every contraction, it is not used where its letters would reach across the join between the parts of a compound word (10.11).
Updated 27 September 2026. Until 18 September this section gave the positions — start, middle, end — where the sign agreed with the reference translator more often than not, and the translator followed those. It follows the rule above now; the survey explains what changed and why.
You will meet it as a word, not a fragment
The rule allows it inside a longer word, but none of the 5,000 commonest English words actually takes it there. Some on this list earn most of their keep buried in longer words — “part” turns up in nineteen of them — but this is not one of those. What it does have is the word itself, which stands 106th of those 5,000.
Words where it is written out instead
| Word | Written as | Why |
|---|---|---|
| shadow | the rulebook's own example of a word written without it (10.7.3) |
The other 5 words under dots 4-5-6
A small group, so the prefix is already a strong clue.
In a whole book
In a count over the whole of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (26,439 words), this contraction is written 186 times and saves 186 cells. That is 0.54% of everything Grade 2 saves in the book, and ranks it 49th of the 158 contractions used.
The words it is written in: had (178), hadn't (8).
Check your own text
Type “had” into the translator with Grade 2 selected to see both cells, or take the full list.
“had” in braille as an image
Both cells as a picture: dots 4, 5 and 6, then dots 1, 2 and 5 — the whole word in two cells rather than 3 letters.
