because it appeared to its users to have some elegance or to remind them of prestigious old calligraphy. Use for Tironian et The abbreviation etc. was typeset using the Tironian et , as in early incunables. Later, when typesets no longer contained a sort for the Tironian et, it became common practice to use the r rotunda glyph instead, setting for etc. Demise Use of the letter form was never widespread except in blackletter scripts and so it fell out of use in English in the 16th century as roman scripts became predominant. Modern cursive scripts use a letter that has a resemblance to the r rotunda. Encoding The letter was proposed to be added to Unicode in 2005, in the Latin Extended-D block. As per Unicode 5.1, although there seems to be no real evidence for the historical existence of a capital version and a normal capital R seems to have been used instead. Before, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) had allocated it in the Private Use Area (PUA) of medievalist fonts at U+F20E and U+F22D. Since the characters are available in Unicode, MUFI recommends that the Unicode code points be used, not the PUA code points. Some fonts treat the glyph as a mere stylistic variant of and may make it available by smart font features, e.g. Open Type 'hist', 'hlig', 'calt', 'salt' or 'ss**'. Latin Extended-D also has characters for medieval scribal abbreviations. Among them is the abbreviation for the syllable rum, consisting of a r rotunda with a cut, resulting in a shape very similar to the astrological symbol for Jupiter . See also Long s References External links Blackletter Typography Palaeographic letters