It commonly represents the voiced dental stop /d̪/, like the pronunciation of ⟨d⟩ in "door", except closer to the teeth.

The major graphic difference between De and its modern Greek equivalent lies in the two descenders ("feet") below the lower corners of the Cyrillic letter.

Southern (Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian) typography may prefer a variant that looks like a single-storey lowercase Latin ⟨g⟩.

Cursive lowercase De has the same two shapes, but with a different distribution: for example, the g-shaped variant is a standard for schools in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus but also used for certain typefaces with OpenType features.

[1] The (Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian-Bulgarian) cursive form of capital De looks like Latin D as the printed version is not comfortable enough to be written quickly.