Nash stands fifteenth, writes n, and carries the numeral 50 from Greek nu. Its name is the Slavonic possessive meaning ours, the word that opens the Lord's Prayer in Slavonic and therefore one of the first words any learner of the language met.
The shape is not the Greek nu a modern reader would expect. Early Cyrillic writes this letter with the crossbar slanting, as in the Greek uncial, and the horizontal crossbar familiar from the modern printed letter is the result of a slow straightening across the manuscript centuries. It is one of the few Cyrillic letters whose shape can be dated with any confidence from the angle of a single stroke.
As a numeral it is 50, which puts it on the fiftieth psalm, the psalm of repentance and the most frequently recited of all in the Orthodox offices. A Slavonic reader met this letter under a titlo constantly for that reason alone.
Nash survives unchanged in sound and position in every modern Cyrillic alphabet. Its name, like all the others, was replaced in Russian by an invented syllable in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century reforms of the primer, on the argument that a child learning to read should hear the sound of a letter rather than a word beginning with it.