soft sign

EnglishEdit

EtymologyEdit

 
The uppercase and lowercase versions of the soft sign.

Calque of Russian мя́гкий знак (mjáxkij znak),[1] from мя́гкий (mjáxkij, palatal, palatized, soft) + знак (znak, mark, sign).

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

soft sign (plural soft signs)

  1. The Cyrillic letter Ь/ь (transliterated in English with an apostrophe () or prime ()), which in modern languages using the Cyrillic alphabet serves to denote a soft (palatized) consonant.
    Synonyms: front jer, front yer
    Antonym: hard sign

HypernymsEdit

TranslationsEdit

ReferencesEdit

  1. ^ soft sign, n.” under “soft, adj.”, in OED Online  , Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, March 2021; “soft sign, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further readingEdit