Old Cyrillic Letters (Old Church Slavonic)

Cyrillic was devised in the First Bulgarian Empire at the end of the 9th century, in the literary schools of Preslav and Ohrid, by the pupils of Saints Cyril and Methodius. They took the Greek uncial letters for the sounds Greek and Slavic shared and added letters for the sounds Greek lacked, several of them adapted from Glagolitic: Ж, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, the yers Ъ Ь, the yat Ѣ and the nasal yuses Ѧ Ѫ. The language written in it, Old Church Slavonic, was the Slavic of the Thessaloniki region as Cyril and Methodius had learned it, and the earliest Cyrillic alphabet had about 43 letters, each with a name (azŭ, buky, vědě, glagoli, dobro…) and most with a number value.

Over a thousand years every nation that writes Cyrillic trimmed the list in its own way. Peter the Great's civil type of 1708 to 1710 removed Ѱ, Ѯ, Ѡ, Ѫ, Ѧ, Ꙗ, Ѥ and the digraph Ѹ from secular Russian printing; the Russian reform of 1918 then removed Ѣ, Ѳ, І and in practice Ѵ. Vuk Karadžić's Serbian alphabet of 1818 dropped yat and the yers along with other letters it had no use for. Bulgarian kept Ѣ and Ѫ until its 1945 reform. The result is the set on this page: letters that no living alphabet uses but that fill Church Slavonic books, pre-1918 Russian and pre-1945 Bulgarian texts, icons, inscriptions and the whole medieval literature of the Orthodox Slavs.

Church Slavonic itself never went away. It is still the liturgical language of the Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian Orthodox churches and of several Greek Catholic churches, printed in its own typeface with all these letters, the titlo and the superscript letters. The modern alphabets have their own pages here (Russian Alphabet & Letters, Bulgarian Alphabet & Letters, Serbian Cyrillic Alphabet, Ukrainian Alphabet & Letters, Macedonian Alphabet & Letters), and the older sister script is on Glagolitic Alphabet.

What each old letter was for: yat, the yuses, fita, izhitsa, omega, ksi, psi and koppa

Ѣ ѣ yat wrote a long open e, the vowel of хлѣбъ (bread), вѣра (faith) and свѣтъ (light). Each language later merged it with something else, which is why the same word is хлеб in Russian, хліб in Ukrainian and хляб in Bulgarian; learning which words took ѣ was the terror of Russian schoolchildren before 1918. The yuses wrote nasal vowels: Ѧ ѧ little yus was ę and Ѫ ѫ big yus was ǫ, as in рѫка (hand) and пѫть (path); their iotified forms Ѩ ѩ and Ѭ ѭ added a y-glide, as in ѩзꙑкъ (tongue, language). The nasal sounds died out in most Slavic languages by the 11th century, and the letters lived on as spelling. Ꙗ ꙗ iotified a (ja) and Ѥ ѥ iotified e (je) were built the way Ю was, by joining І to the vowel; the modern letter Я descends from a cursive little yus, not from Ꙗ.

Ѹ ѹ uk is the Greek ου digraph, two letters for one sound, and manuscripts also stacked them into the single monograph Ꙋ ꙋ, the ancestor of modern У. Ꙑ ꙑ is the original yeru, written as a hard sign plus і, which later took the shape Ы. Ꙁ ꙁ zemlya is the early shape of З and had the number value 7; Ꙃ ꙃ dzelo became Ѕ, still used in Macedonian today.

A whole set of letters existed only for Greek words and for numbers. Ѡ ѡ omega wrote o in Greek names and the preposition ѿ (from), which has its own letter Ѿ ѿ, ot; Ѽ ѽ, omega with a titlo-like mark, is the exclamation O! of prayers. Ѯ ѯ ksi and Ѱ ѱ psi spelt Алеѯандръ and ѱаломъ (psalm). Ѳ ѳ fita is the Greek theta, pronounced f by Slavs, so Ѳеодоръ became Фёдор when fita was abolished. Ѵ ѵ izhitsa is upsilon, read v after a vowel (Єѵа, Eve) and i elsewhere (мѵро, myrrh); Ѷ ѷ with two grave strokes marks the i reading. Ҁ ҁ koppa was never a sound at all, only the number 90, and was replaced in that job by Ч within the first few centuries.

Titlo, pokrytie and the superscript letters: how Church Slavonic abbreviates

The titlo ҃ (U+0483) is the mark most searched for on this page. It is a short wavy line drawn over a word to show that letters have been left out, and it is reserved for the sacred words: бг҃ъ is Богъ (God), гд҃ь Господь (Lord), і҆и҃съ хр҃то́съ Jesus Christ, бц҃а Богородица (Mother of God), аг҃глъ angel. The same words spelt out in full mean something else: без титла, 'without a titlo', the word бог could denote a pagan god. A titlo over a letter also turns it into a number (see below). It is a combining character, so type the letter first and the titlo after it, and expect fonts that lack Church Slavonic support to misplace it.

Church Slavonic's second habit is to lift a letter out of the word and write it small above the line, usually under a little arch called the pokrytie ҇ (U+0487): гдⷭ҇ь, хрⷭ҇то́съ, прⷣ҇тча (forerunner). Unicode encodes these raised letters as the combining letters ⷠ ⷡ ⷢ ⷣ… of the Cyrillic Extended-A block and a few more in Extended-B (ꙴ ꙵ ꙶ ꙷ ꙸ ꙹ ꙺ ꙻ ꚞ ꚟ); the grid above lists them in alphabet order. Each one attaches to the letter before it: type д, then ⷭ, then ҇. The vzmet ꙯ is a titlo variant, the kavyka ꙼ ꙾ marks a footnote or a word the reader may replace, and the payerok ꙽ ꙿ stands for an omitted yer, much as an apostrophe stands for an omitted letter in English.

Church Slavonic also marks stress and breathing the Greek way. The psili ҆ (U+0486) stands over every word-initial vowel (і҆и҃съ, ѻ҆́ч҃е), the dasia ҅ is rare, and the palatalization mark ҄ shows a softened consonant in some early manuscripts. The stress accents themselves, oxia ́ (U+0301), varia ̀ (U+0300) and kamora ̑ (U+0311), are the ordinary combining accents shared with Latin and Greek, so they are not in this grid; see Letters with Accents.

Cyrillic numerals: letters as numbers, ҂ for thousands

Before Peter the Great introduced Arabic figures in 1708, all Slavic countries writing Cyrillic counted with letters, following the Greek pattern rather than the Cyrillic alphabet order. Units: а҃ 1, в҃ 2, г҃ 3, д҃ 4, є҃ 5, ѕ҃ 6, з҃ 7, и҃ 8, ѳ҃ 9. Tens: і҃ 10, к҃ 20, л҃ 30, м҃ 40, н҃ 50, ѯ҃ 60, ѻ҃ 70, п҃ 80, ч҃ 90 (ҁ҃ in the oldest texts). Hundreds: р҃ 100, с҃ 200, т҃ 300, у҃ 400 (also ѵ), ф҃ 500, х҃ 600, ѱ҃ 700, ѡ҃ 800, ц҃ 900 (ѧ in early manuscripts). Letters that only existed as numbers, like koppa, or whose value Greek gave them, like ksi, psi, fita and omega, are the reason those letters survived so long.

A titlo over the group (over the second-to-last letter in longer numbers) shows that the letters are a number, and dots often fence it off from the text. Numbers from 11 to 19 are written units first, as they are spoken: а҃і is 11, 'one on ten'. The thousands sign ҂ (U+0482) before a letter multiplies it by 1000: ҂а҃ is 1000, ҂з҃ 7000, and the year 7208 of the Byzantine era, Peter's 1700, was ҂зс҃и. Larger numbers wrap the letter in a sign: a circle for a тьма (10,000), the dotted ring ҈ for a легіонъ (100,000), the ring of commas ҉ for a леодръ (1,000,000), and the Extended-B signs ꙰ ꙱ ꙲ for a воронъ (10 million), колода (100 million) and тьма темъ (1000 million). Icons, church calendars, bells and old gravestones still date themselves this way, and the Roman Numeral Symbols page covers the Western counterpart.

Manuscript letterforms, phonetic superscripts, fonts and how to type old Cyrillic

Unicode's first Cyrillic block (1991) already held Ѡ to Ҁ, the titlo, the breathings and the number signs. Cyrillic Extended-A and Extended-B followed in Unicode 5.1 (2008) with the combining letters, the manuscript variants and the old Abkhaz letters. Extended-B is where the famous eye letters live: ꙩ monocular o, ꙫ binocular o, ꙭ double monocular o and ꙮ multiocular o, decorative forms of the letter o that scribes drew in the words for 'eye' and 'many-eyed' (ꙩко, многоꙮчитїи). The soft Ꙣ Ꙥ Ꙧ, the reversed Ꙅ Ꙕ Ꙡ, the closed and blended yuses Ꙙ Ꙛ Ꙝ and the Romanian-Cyrillic Ꙟ ꙟ (în, îm) are there for the same reason: editions of old texts need to show which shape the scribe used. The letters Ꚁ to Ꚗ are not Slavonic at all but come from the Cyrillic alphabets written for Abkhaz between the 1860s and the 1920s; they are here because they are old Cyrillic letters that no alphabet uses any more.

Cyrillic Extended-C (Unicode 9.0, 2016) adds nine letterforms of Old Russian and Church Slavonic type: rounded ve ᲀ, long-legged de ᲁ, narrow o ᲂ, wide es ᲃ, tall te ᲄ, three-legged te ᲅ, tall hard sign ᲆ, tall yat ᲇ and unblended uk ᲈ. They look like ordinary в д о с т ъ ѣ у in most fonts, which is exactly the point: they exist for specialists who need to say which shape a manuscript has, and they should not be used in running text. Cyrillic Extended-D (Unicode 15.0, 2022) is different in purpose: its raised letters 𞀰 𞀱 𞀲… and lowered letters 𞁑 𞁒 𞁓… are spacing characters for phonetic and dialect transcription, the Cyrillic counterpart of the small raised letters linguists use with Latin (see IPA Phonetic Symbols); ꚜ and ꚝ are the raised hard and soft sign, used to mark palatalization. The last column of that grid, 𞂏, is a combining і added in the same version.

Everything here is plain text and copies into any document, but display depends on the font. The basic old letters (Ѣ Ѧ Ѫ Ѳ Ѵ Ѡ Ѯ Ѱ) are in nearly every font with Cyrillic. The combining letters, the Extended-C shapes and the number signs need a font made for Church Slavonic: the free Ponomar Unicode, Fedorovsk and Menaion fonts of the Slavonic Computing Initiative, or Noto Serif and Noto Sans, which cover Extended-A, B and C. Extended-D is new enough that most systems show it as boxes; Noto Sans Symbols 2 and recent Noto Sans releases include it. To type a letter by its code, use Alt+X after the hex code in Microsoft Word (0463 Alt+X gives ѣ) or Ctrl+Shift+U on Linux and ChromeOS; the Slavonic Computing Initiative publishes Church Slavonic keyboard layouts for Windows, macOS and Linux, and every character on this page can be tapped and copied.