In most cursive writing, lowercase Te looks like the Latin lowercase m. The Cyrillic letter Te was derived from the Greek letter Tau (Τ τ).

The name of Te in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was тврьдо (tvrdo), meaning "hard" or "surly".

In italic type and cursive, the lowercase form ⟨т⟩ looks like the italic form of the lowercase Latin M ⟨m⟩, except in Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian usage where it looks like an inverted lowercase Latin M, with a stroke above to distinguish it from the otherwise identical italic lowercase letter Sha ⟨ш⟩, which is sometimes written with a stroke below.

In some old materials, the lowercase form ⟨т⟩ has two variants: on the Trebnik of Metropolitan Peter and the Ostrog Bible this letter has a taller variant looks like number 7 (ᲄ); on some vernacular Russian publications up to the mid-19th century, this letter have been found as a variant resembling a turned Sha (ᲅ).

[1] Both of them were encoded in the Unicode Standard in June 2016 with the release of version 9.0.