# Æ

**Æ** (lowercase **æ**) is a Latin-script character formed as a ligature of the letters a and e, originally used to write the Latin diphthong *ae* and later promoted to the status of an independent letter in several northern European languages.<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> In English it is traditionally called **ash**, from [Old English](https://www.edgepedia.org/old-english) *æsc*, and the modern [International Phonetic Alphabet](https://www.edgepedia.org/international-phonetic-alphabet) uses its lowercase form for the near-open front unrounded vowel, the vowel of English *cat*.<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup>

| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Origin | A ligature of a and e, originally representing the Latin diphthong *ae*<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> |
| Unicode encoding | U+00C6 Æ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE and U+00E6 æ LATIN SMALL LETTER AE, in the Latin-1 Supplement block<sup>[2](https://unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/charts/nameslist/0080/)</sup> |
| Letter status | A separate letter in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese; a typographic variant of *ae* in English and Latin<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[3](https://unicode.org/review/pr-47.html)</sup> |
| Old English name | *æsc*, "ash tree", after the Anglo-Saxon futhorc rune ᚫ that it transliterated<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> |
| IPA value | [æ], the near-open front unrounded vowel, as in English *cat*<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> |
| Diacritic variants | Ǣ/ǣ, Ǽ/ǽ, Æ̀/æ̀, Æ̂/æ̂, and Æ̃/æ̃<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> |
| Sorting | Traditionally sorted as an expansion of AE, like Πas OE, except in the languages where it is a letter of the alphabet<sup>[3](https://unicode.org/review/pr-47.html)</sup> |

## Latin origins

In classical Latin, *ae* was a native diphthong, and it also appeared in words borrowed from Greek that originally contained the digraph αι, as in Latinized spellings such as *Æschylus*.<sup>[4](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/ae)</sup> The ligature æ was used inconsistently for this digraph in classical Latin, appearing in both native words and Greek-derived ones.<sup>[5](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1458571/)</sup>

From a Latin point of view, æ is typically understood as a ligature rather than a letter: it stands for the diphthong *ae* and can always be written out as the two letters, so *Curriculum vitæ* equals *Curriculum vitae*. When the vowels fall in different syllables, as in *aer*, the ligature is not used.<sup>[6](https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/14927/%C3%86-ligature-the-definitive-answer)</sup>

In Visigothic script, an "e cedilla" frequently replaces the Latin ligature *ae*, and editing guidelines for medieval Hispanic manuscripts direct that this form be kept and transcribed as a distinct character.<sup>[7](https://docentes.fcsh.unl.pt/aemiliano/CV/ficheiros/rel-02.pdf)</sup>

## Old English ash

Old English took the character over as a letter in its own right. As a letter of the [Old English Latin alphabet](https://www.edgepedia.org/old-english-latin-alphabet) it was called *æsc*, "ash tree", after the Anglo-Saxon futhorc rune ᚫ, which it transliterated; the traditional English name is still ash.<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> In Old English writings the ligature æ, or ash, and the letter cluster *ae* were variant spellings, both representing the low front unrounded vowel [æ], as in *dæg* "day".<sup>[8](https://www.journals.vu.lt/kalbotyra/article/download/20669/19806/36567)</sup> The Old English alphabet also contained other symbols later lost to English, including eth (ð), thorn (þ), wynn (Ƿ), and yogh (ȝ).<sup>[9](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED268548.pdf)</sup>

The symbol disappeared from English in the 13th century.<sup>[10](https://wehd.com/2/Ae1.html)</sup> It returned in the 16th century, when writers borrowed Latin words containing æ, and Greek words in αι, for concepts not in the language.<sup>[11](https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-ash1.html)</sup> This revived æ had only an etymological value: whenever a word became thoroughly English, the æ or *ae* was changed to a simple *e*, giving *edify* and *ether* from earlier *ædify* and *æther*.<sup>[10](https://wehd.com/2/Ae1.html)</sup> In due course the ligature morphed back into the digraph *ae*, as in *haemo-* forms, perhaps because of the strangeness of the ligature or because it required an extra print character.<sup>[5](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1458571/)</sup> The distinction between the two uses survives in editorial practice: the Æ in the Old English author name Ælfric is a single letter, ash, whereas the Ae in [Aeschylus](https://www.edgepedia.org/aeschylus) is a digraph.<sup>[12](https://www.as.utexas.edu/utgal08/aspauthor2006.pdf)</sup>

## A letter of the northern alphabets

In several Nordic languages, æ has full letter status with its own place in the alphabet, and it is not interchangeable with *ae*.<sup>[6](https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/14927/%C3%86-ligature-the-definitive-answer)</sup> It is a letter in Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> Old Swedish also used æ before replacing it with ä.<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> Forming ligatures is one way of increasing the inventory of letters, and Danish æ from *ae* is cited alongside the development of w from *vv* as an example.<sup>[13](https://coehuman.uodiyala.edu.iq/uploads/Coehuman%20library%20pdf/English%20library%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A8%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B2%D9%8A/linguistics/Routledge%20Dictionary%20of%20Language%20and%20Linguistics.pdf)</sup>

In Norwegian, Æ is pronounced as a broad, front vowel before r, and otherwise most often as e.<sup>[14](https://snl.no/%C3%86_-_bokstav)</sup> The Icelandic alphabet lists Æ among its letters, described as a single letter rather than an a-e ligature.<sup>[15](https://isnet.is/guides/icelandic-alphabet/)</sup> Medieval Nordic orthographies innovated a number of letters out of original Latin ligated letters, some of which, like Æ æ and Œ œ, are well known today.<sup>[16](https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n2957.pdf)</sup>

The character also appears outside [Scandinavia](https://www.edgepedia.org/scandinavia): it is used in the official orthography of the Kawésqar language, spoken in Chile, and of the Fuegian language Yaghan.<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup> A Cyrillic counterpart, Ӕ (Cyrillic capital ligature a ie), is cross-referenced from the Latin character in the Unicode names list.<sup>[2](https://unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/charts/nameslist/0080/)</sup>

## English usage today

In [British English](https://www.edgepedia.org/british-english), the ligature has been replaced by *ae* in all but the most scholarly or old-fashioned writing, so that older *ægis*, *æon*, and *leukæmia* are now written *aegis*, *aeon*, and *leukaemia*; the name "ash" itself survives mainly among linguists studying Old English, the modern official title of the character being Latin ligature ae.<sup>[11](https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-ash1.html)</sup> The ligature spelling does survive in some technical British words, such as *œstrogen* or *cæsium*.<sup>[17](https://www.ub.edu/llibre-estil/criteri.php?id=2241)</sup> In American usage, words that use *ae*, or historically æ, are often respelled with *e* instead, as in *demon* from *daemon* and *ether* from *aether*.<sup>[4](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/ae)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[18](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/519763/interweaving-a-and-e-e-g-%C3%A6-in-written-words/519775)</sup> Early modern English and Latin dictionaries printed capitalized ligature forms such as Ægyptus for Latin words beginning with the AE diphthong.<sup>[19](https://www.textkit.com/t/capital-ae-and-oe/9613)</sup>

## Encoding and collation

Æ and æ were encoded in the earliest Unicode versions. A 1996 Unicode mail-list table records U+00C6 with the name LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE AE.<sup>[20](https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML011/0308.html)</sup> The current names are LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE and LATIN SMALL LETTER AE, with the ligature names retained as formal aliases dated to version 1.1; Unicode had been required to abandon its 1.0 names in favor of ISO names before issuing the merged Unicode plus ISO 10646 standard.<sup>[21](https://www.unicode.org/review/pri297/feedback.html)</sup> ISO/IEC 10646 gives the uppercase character the alternate name "ash".<sup>[22](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/06223-02n3875.pdf)</sup> The two code points sit in the Latin-1 Supplement block, which extends the basic 26 letter pairs of ASCII with additional letters for the major languages of Europe, including Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Norwegian.<sup>[2](https://unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/charts/nameslist/0080/)</sup><sup> • </sup><sup>[23](https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/chapter-7/)</sup>

Collation follows letter status. The Unicode Consortium's collation recommendations state that, except for a very few languages, Æ is considered a presentation variant of AE and should sort with a primary weight of AE, just as Œ sorts with a primary weight of OE; readers encountering *hæmophilia* and *haemophilia*, or *cæsium* and *caesium*, treat the two spellings as the same word.<sup>[3](https://unicode.org/review/pr-47.html)</sup> In languages where a letter combination is treated as a letter of the alphabet, it instead has its own sorting position, as with the Swedish letters ä and ö, which are distinct letters following z.<sup>[24](https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode18.0.0/core-spec/chapter-2/)</sup> The English auxiliary exemplar set used for locale data includes æ and œ among the characters that may appear in English text through borrowing.<sup>[25](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10022-tr36-8.html)</sup>

## The ligature in phonetics and typography

The lowercase form serves in the International Phonetic Alphabet as the symbol for the near-open front unrounded vowel, the vowel of English *cat*.<sup>[1](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)</sup>

In typography, æ belongs to the small set of standard orthographic ligatures of the [Latin script](https://www.edgepedia.org/latin-script), alongside w and œ; what counts as a letter of the alphabet is defined by the orthography, not by appearance or technical implementation.<sup>[26](https://opentype.info/blog/2012/11/20/whats-a-ligature.html)</sup> Text-extraction systems must recognize the ligature as a single glyph standing for the pair AE, as in the mapping "AE → Æ" used when dehyphenating and re-letterizing PDF text.<sup>[27](https://ad-publications.cs.uni-freiburg.de/theses/Master_Sumitra_Corraya_2018.pdf)</sup> [Canadian French](https://www.edgepedia.org/canadian-french) style guidance treats Æ and Œ as welded letters whose two vowels must both be capitalized when the ligature begins a sentence or proper name.<sup>[28](https://nos-langues.canada.ca/fr/cles-de-la-redaction/oe-ae-lettres-soudees)</sup> Medieval manuscripts show considerable graphic variation: a study of Old English orthography found that scribes trained in regions reached first by Continental rather than Irish missionaries tended to disfavor the ligature «æ», and that allographs of the letter differ in whether the two components share a minim.<sup>[29](https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A414ece72-fc72-4bba-b93e-73a1d4bc3656/files/dpc289j71j)</sup>

## References

1. [Æ, Folkway Wiki](https://folkway.org/wiki/%C3%86)
2. [C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement, Unicode 18.0.0 names list](https://unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/charts/nameslist/0080/)
3. [UCA Latin Recommendations, Unicode Consortium](https://unicode.org/review/pr-47.html)
4. [AE definition and meaning, Collins English Dictionary](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/ae)
5. [Ditch the digraph, PMC](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1458571/)
6. [Æ ligature – the definitive answer, Latin Language Stack Exchange](https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/14927/%C3%86-ligature-the-definitive-answer)
7. [Edition guidelines for medieval Hispanic texts (e cedilla in Visigothic script)](https://docentes.fcsh.unl.pt/aemiliano/CV/ficheiros/rel-02.pdf)
8. [The English vowel system in the period of the oldest written records, Kalbotyra XXII (3), 1970](https://www.journals.vu.lt/kalbotyra/article/download/20669/19806/36567)
9. [The Old English alphabet, ERIC document ED268548](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED268548.pdf)
10. [Ae, World English Historical Dictionary](https://wehd.com/2/Ae1.html)
11. [Ash: The Old English Ligature Combining A and E, World Wide Words](https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-ash1.html)
12. [**FULL TITLE**](https://www.as.utexas.edu/utgal08/aspauthor2006.pdf)
13. [Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, Routledge](https://coehuman.uodiyala.edu.iq/uploads/Coehuman%20library%20pdf/English%20library%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A8%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%83%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B2%D9%8A/linguistics/Routledge%20Dictionary%20of%20Language%20and%20Linguistics.pdf)
14. [Æ – bokstav – uttale og bruk, Store norske leksikon](https://snl.no/%C3%86_-_bokstav)
15. [The Icelandic Alphabet: Þ, Ð, Æ, Ö and How to Read Them, ISNET](https://isnet.is/guides/icelandic-alphabet/)
16. [ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N2957, medieval Nordic vowels proposal, Unicode Consortium](https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n2957.pdf)
17. [Ligatures, UB Llibre d'estil, University of Barcelona](https://www.ub.edu/llibre-estil/criteri.php?id=2241)
18. [Interweaving A and E (e.g., æ) in written words, English Language & Usage Stack Exchange](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/519763/interweaving-a-and-e-e-g-%C3%A6-in-written-words/519775)
19. [Capital Æ and Œ, Textkit Greek and Latin](https://www.textkit.com/t/capital-ae-and-oe/9613)
20. [Unicode Mail List Archive: RE: short Unicode names?](https://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML011/0308.html)
21. [Public Review Issue #297 feedback, Unicode Consortium](https://www.unicode.org/review/pri297/feedback.html)
22. [ISO/IEC International Standard 10646-1 (character name tables)](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2006/06223-02n3875.pdf)
23. [Chapter 7, Europe-I, Unicode 16.0.0 Core Specification](https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/chapter-7/)
24. [Chapter 2, Unicode 18.0.0 Core Specification](https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode18.0.0/core-spec/chapter-2/)
25. [UTR #36: Unicode Security Considerations](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10022-tr36-8.html)
26. [What's a ligature?, OpenType.info blog](https://opentype.info/blog/2012/11/20/whats-a-ligature.html)
27. [Dehyphenation of Words and Guessing Ligatures, University of Freiburg](https://ad-publications.cs.uni-freiburg.de/theses/Master_Sumitra_Corraya_2018.pdf)
28. [œ/æ (lettres soudées), Clés de la rédaction, Portail linguistique du Canada](https://nos-langues.canada.ca/fr/cles-de-la-redaction/oe-ae-lettres-soudees)
29. [Old English front vowel orthography in the 7th and 8th centuries, Oxford University Research Archive](https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A414ece72-fc72-4bba-b93e-73a1d4bc3656/files/dpc289j71j)

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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script*

*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*

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