Cyrillic Capital Letter Iotified E

It writes the sound “ye.” The name “iotified e” refers to the y-like sound before the vowel. The letter probably developed from і and е. Old Church Slavonic, the language used for early Slavic Christian texts, included it in its Cyrillic spelling.

The letter appears in the tenth-century Mostich inscription, a text carved on stone, and in the Codex Suprasliensis, a medieval Slavic book. Manuscripts did not use it consistently: the eleventh-century Enina Apostle omits it. East Slavic scribes dropped it after the fourteenth century, while South Slavic books retained it into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Read it as a spelling choice within a particular tradition.

Church Slavonic typefaces may draw Ѥ differently, especially when they imitate older printed or handwritten styles.