The r rotunda in a Latin Bible of AD 1407, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England.

The r rotunda, as rendered by the Leeds Uni font.

The r rotunda (ꝛ, always lowercase), "rounded r," is an old letter variant found in full script-like typefaces, especially blackletters. Among a variety of visual flourishes, such as ligatures, conjoined letters, scribal abbreviations, swash characters, and the "long s", "r rotunda" was an outstanding example of the beauty and visually interesting forms that proliferated in the centuries before and after the proliferation of the printing press. R rotunda used less space on expensive parchment and paper; it became popular among typesetters, providing a visual diversity of form and beauty, particularly in blackletter typefaces.

Half-r may follow any lower-case letter that ends in an even downstroke of x-height, depending on the judgment of the type-designer. Hence, in blackletter, it may follow the letters "b", "o", "p", or "d", each of which has (in blackletter typefaces) a straight terminal downstroke, which provides the missing "half" of the "r". It never begins a word. This symbol came in several different artistic interpretations, all of which were of x-height.

[edit] Original form

The shape of the letter used in blackletter scripts Textualis as well as Rotunda is reminiscent of “half an r”, namely, the right side of the Roman capital “R”; it looks a bit like an Arabic numeral “2”.

This character form also played a part in a common scribal abbreviation. The tail was extended to the right and a cross-bar was put through it, producing a figure very much like the ancient Greek symbol for the planet Jupiter. This stood for the Latin syllable ram as well as the genitive plural terminations, —orum and —arum. This abbreviation character could follow any other character.

[edit] Other forms

Also found in Textura manuscripts is a very narrow second variant, in the form of one solid diamond atop another atop a vertical stroke.

One form used in blackletter looked quite similar to the currency sign for the British pound without the crossbars. But it had no loop at the top and its understroke was quite short.

Another form found in German typefaces was a variant of that previous, with the part of an "s" that looks like an integral sign atop something rather like a "c". This one can be found used also as the second "r" of a pair and following "e".

[edit] Italic form

A fifth form, used in the eighteenth century in some French italic typefaces, was a derivative either of the Schrift form of the minuscule "r", or of similar typefaces used elsewhere. Its form was of a backwards "J" set just after the same shape rotated 180 degrees. They were separated by a space smaller than the stroke width between them, and the whole character was slanted as though it were cursive. As this typeface had the "d" that curved to the left, it was used after that character as well. By this time, though, the character was the same width as a regular "r", so it was maintained because it appeared to its users to have some elegance, or to remind them of prestigious old calligraphy.

[edit] Demise of the r rotunda

Comparison of the r rotunda and the normal r using the Leeds Uni typeface

Usage of the letter form was never widespread except in blackletter scripts, so it fell out of use in English during the 16th century as roman scripts became predominant.

The r rotunda was not encoded in Unicode up to the fourth version of that standard. The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative allocated it in the Private Use Area of medievalist fonts at U+F20E. The letter was submitted in a preliminary proposal to be added to Unicode and was later codified in Unicode 5.1, superseding the MUFI allocation. The positions are U+A75A (majuscule) and U+A75B (minuscule).