The letters Q (chiu), W (dublu ve), and Y (igrec or i grec, meaning "Greek i") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier.

The letter K, although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as kilogram, broker, karate.

[3] These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such as nomenklatură (normally nomenclatură, meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes spelled with k instead of c if referring to members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as nomenklatura is used in English).

In cases where the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above alphabet, official spelling tends to favor their use (München, Angoulême etc., as opposed to the use of Istanbul over İstanbul).

Romanian orthography does not use accents or diacritics – these are secondary symbols added to letters (i.e. basic glyphs) to alter their pronunciation or to distinguish between words.

In 1953, during the Communist era, the Romanian Academy eliminated the letter â, replacing it with î everywhere, including the name of the country, which was to be spelled Romînia.

The first stipulation coincided with the official designation of the country as a People's Republic, which meant that its full title was Republica Populară Romînă.

Soon after the fall of the Ceaușescu government, the Romanian Academy decided to reintroduce â from 1993 onward, by canceling the effects of the 1953 spelling reform and essentially reverting to the 1904 rules (with some differences).

[16][17] According to the 1993 reform, the choice between î and â is thus again based on a rule that is neither strictly etymological nor phonological, but positional and morphological.

Exceptions include proper nouns where the usage of the letters is frozen, whichever it may be, and compound words, whose components are each separately subjected to the rule (e.g. ne- + îndemânatic → neîndemânatic "clumsy", not *neândemânatic).

However, the exception no longer applies to words derived with suffixes, in contrast with the 1904 norm; for instance what was spelled urît after 1904 became urât after 1993.

[18] In fact, this includes a large number of words that contained an i in the original Latin and are similarly written with i in their Italian or Spanish counterparts.

Examples include rîu "river", from the Latin rivus (compare Spanish río), now written râu; along with rîde < ridere, sîn < sinus, strînge < stringere, lumînare < luminaria, etc.

Some publications allow authors to choose either spelling norm; these include România literară, the magazine of the Writers' Union of Romania, and publishing houses such as Polirom.

The choice of â derives from a being the most average or central of the five vowels (the official Bulgarian romanization uses the same logic, choosing a for ъ, resulting in the country's name being spelled Balgariya; and also the European Portuguese vowel /ɐ/ for a mentioned above), whereas î is an attempt to choose the Latin letter that most intuitively writes the sound /ɨ/ (similarly to how Polish uses the letter y).

[26] Use of these letters was not fully adopted even before 1904, as some publications (e.g. Timpul and Universul) chose to use a simplified approach that resembled today's Romanian language writing.

This use is regular in dictionary headwords, but also occasionally found in carefully edited texts to disambiguate between homographs that are not also homophones, such as to differentiate between cópii ("copies") and copíi ("children"), éra ("the era") and erá ("was"), ácele ("the needles") and acéle ("those"), etc.

Foreign names are also usually spelled with their original diacritics: Bâle, Molière, even when an acute accent might be wrongly interpreted as a stress, as in István or Gérard.

In May 2007, four months after Romania (and Bulgaria) joined the EU, Microsoft released updated fonts that include all official glyphs of the Romanian (and Bulgarian) alphabet.

The unfortunate consequence of this decision is that Romanian documents using the (unofficial) Unicode points U+015E/F and U+0162/3 (for ş and ţ) are rendered in Adobe fonts in a visually inconsistent way using "s with cedilla", but "t with comma" (see figure).

Red Hat's Liberation fonts only support the comma below variants starting with version 1.04, scheduled for inclusion in Fedora 10.

When this second (but optional) remapping takes place, Romanian Unicode text is rendered with comma-below glyphs regardless of code point variants.

do not implement the ROM/locl feature, even after the European Union Expansion Font Update,[34] so old documents will look inconsistent as in the left side of the above figure.

The lack of a standard LICR (LaTeX Internal Character Representations) for comma-below Ș and Ț is part of the problem.

The Polish QX encoding has some support for comma-below glyphs, which are improperly mapped to cedilla LICRs, but also lacks A breve (Ă), which must always be composite, thus unsearchable.