Cursive G — How to Write G in Cursive

Look closely at a lowercase g in a printed book and then at the g you write by hand: they are usually two different letters. Typefaces commonly use the double-storey g — a small closed bowl on top joined by a narrow link to a second closed loop below, the shape sometimes called a binocular g. Almost nobody writes that by hand. Handwriting, and cursive in particular, uses the single-storey g: one round oval with a single tail dropping below the line.

This is why cursive g feels unfamiliar to people who learned to read before they learned to write. The g in your reading book and the g your teacher demonstrated on the board are genuinely different shapes, and only one of them is built for a moving pen. The single-storey form exists precisely because it can be drawn without lifting: oval, straight down, loop back up, connect. The double-storey g cannot be — it needs pen lifts, which is fatal in joined-up writing.

Cursive g and cursive q begin identically. Both start as a closed round oval on the baseline, exactly the same shape as a cursive a. Both then send a stroke straight down below the writing line. The one and only thing that separates them is which way the tail turns at the bottom: g loops back to the left, q hooks out to the right.

That single difference carries the entire distinction between the two letters, which is why sloppy tail direction is the most common source of unreadable cursive. If you are drilling the oval family, practise g and q back to back — 'gag' and 'quiq' are nonsense words but they force your hand to commit to the tail direction every few strokes. Get the tails right and the pair stays legible even at speed.

The stylish characters at the top of this page are real Unicode text, not a font or an image, so they survive copy-paste into any plain-text field. Script G has a curiosity worth knowing: its two cases live in different Unicode blocks. The capital 𝒢 is U+1D4A2, in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block with most script letters. The lowercase ℊ is U+210A, over in Letterlike Symbols.

It is the exact mirror of what happens with script F, where it is the capital that sits outside the main block. In both cases the reason is the same: those characters had already been encoded in Unicode before the mathematical alphabet block was created, so the newer block was left with gaps rather than encoding the same letters a second time. None of this affects you when copying — both 𝒢 and ℊ are standard characters that render on current phones and computers. It only bites if you are generating script letters programmatically and assume they run in one unbroken sequence.