At the beginning of the 20th century, the only two words still spelled with the letter izhitsa in common use were мѵро (müro, [ˈmʲirə], 'chrism') and сѵнодъ (sünod, [sʲɪˈnot], 'synod').

In the documents of the spelling reform of 1917–1918, izhitsa is not mentioned at all,[1][2] although the statement that it was canceled at that time, along with decimal i, yat and fita, is not only widespread, but also reflected in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

[citation needed] The traditional spelling of Serbian was more conservative; it preserved all etymologically motivated izhitsas in words of Greek origin.

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić had reformed the Serbian alphabet in the beginning of the nineteenth century and eliminated the letter, but the old spelling was used in some places as late as the 1880s.

In older Serbian books, kendema most often looked like two dots (trema) or might even be replaced by a surrogate combination of aspiration and acute.

These shape distinctions (with the exception of the aspiration-acute combination) have no orthographical meaning and must be considered as just font style variations, thus the Unicode name "IZHITSA WITH DOUBLE GRAVE" is slightly misleading.

While in modern editions of ancient and modern Greek the trema is used only to prevent a digraph (as <ευ> [ev, ef] versus <εϋ> [ei]), Slavonic usage of kendema still continues that of many medieval Greek manuscripts, in which the "diaeresis" sign was often used simply to mark an upsilon or iota as such, irrespective of any other vowels (e.g. δϊαλϋτϊκά, which would not be correct by today's conventions).