Voiced dental fricative

Uncommon card · No. 117848

A voiced dental fricative is a consonant sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to most English-speakers as the ⟨th⟩ sound in father. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet for this sound is eth ⟨ð⟩, which was taken from the Old English and Icelandic alphabets. In Old English, the letter was used interchangeably with thorn ⟨þ⟩ for either this sound or its unvoiced counterpart, IPA: [θ]; in Icelandic, eth is solely used for this sound, and thorn its unvoiced counterpart. Such fricatives are often called "interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth (as in Received Pronunciation), and not just against the back of the upper teeth, as they are with other dental consonants. The letter ⟨ð⟩ is sometimes used to represent a voiced dental approximant, a similar sound, which no language is known to contrast with a dental non-sibilant fricative. However, the approximant can be explicitly indicated with the lowering diacritic...

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