Old English Letter R — Copy & Paste

The r is the letter where blackletter's rules get strangest. Scribes wrote two completely different lowercase r's and chose between them by context: the upright r you would recognise, and the r rotunda — ꝛ, a rounded form that looks like a small numeral 2 — used whenever the r followed a letter with a round right side, like o, b or p. 'Word' took one r; 'or' took the other. The rule existed purely for visual flow: after a curve, the round r nestled in where the upright form would have left an awkward gap.

The r rotunda survived into early printing (Unicode preserves it at U+A75B) before dying out with the rest of blackletter's contextual letterforms. The bold Fraktur 𝖗 you copy on this page descends from the upright branch — but if you ever wondered why the r in old manuscripts sometimes looks like a 2, you have met the rotunda.

R heads the list of letters people look for in this style, and the reasons stack: R-names are everywhere (Rose, Ryan, Rodriguez, Rivera), r is among the most frequent consonants in English, and the blackletter R has exactly the kind of dramatic silhouette people want from a gothic monogram — a heavy stem, a fractured shoulder, and a leg that kicks out with real attitude.

The capital 𝕽 (U+1D57D) holds its identity better than many Fraktur capitals because that stem-and-leg skeleton survives the ornament. It reads as an R at monogram sizes where the 𝕬 or 𝕿 turn ambiguous, which makes it one of the safer choices for anything permanent.

In running converted text the lowercase 𝖗 (U+1D597) is the workhorse — compact, with a distinctive split shoulder that keeps it legible between round neighbours. Words that stress it usefully: 'warrior' and 'brother' put r against vowels in multiple positions; if those stay clean in the converter below at your intended size, the letter will hold up anywhere.

The classic pairing trap is 'rn': in dense blackletter the r's shoulder can fuse visually with a following n into something like an m — the same minim ambiguity that gave medieval readers 'minimum' headaches. Letter-spacing solves it; so does previewing at final size before engraving or inking.

𝕽 and 𝖗 are ordinary Unicode text — click the copy buttons at the top and paste them wherever text is accepted. They render on every current phone and desktop, and unlike an image of a gothic R, they survive edits, quotes and searches intact.