B

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B
B b
Usage
Writing system
Latin language
Phonetic usage
Time periodunknown to present
Descendants
  • ฿
Sisters
Other
Other letters commonly used withbv
bh
bp
bm

bf
Associated numbers2
Writing directionLeft-to-Right
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and  , see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is bee (pronounced /ˈb/), plural bees.[1][2]

It represents the

voiced bilabial stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants
.

History

Egyptian
Pr
Phoenician
bēt
Western Greek
beta
Etruscan
B
Latin
B
Egyptian hieroglyphic house Phoenician beth Greek beta Etruscan B Latin B

The Roman ⟨B⟩ derived from the

ב⟩ is a separate development of the Phoenician letter.[3]

By

Cyrillic letter ve В represents the same sound, so a modified form known as be Б was developed to represent the Slavic languages' /b/.[3] (Modern Greek continues to lack a letter for the voiced bilabial plosive and transliterates such sounds from other languages using the digraph/consonant cluster
μπ, mp.)

𐌁 ⟩ either directly or via Latin B
⟩.

The

Renaissance Italy from a combination of Roman inscriptions and Carolingian texts. The present forms of the English cursive
B were developed by the 17th century.

Late Renaissance or early Baroque design of a B, from 1627

Use in writing systems

Pronunciation summary
Languages in italics are not usually written using the Latin alphabet
Language Dialect(s) Pronunciation (IPA) Environment Notes
Mandarin Chinese Standard /p/ Pinyin romanization
English /b/
French /b/, /p/ See French orthography
German /b/, /p/ See German orthography
Portuguese /b/
Spanish /b/
Turkish /b/

English

In

Latin
originals (debitum, dubito, subtilis).

mantispid
standing on it

As /b/ is one of the sounds subject to

Germanic languages may find their cognates in other Indo-European languages appearing with ⟨bh⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨f⟩ or ⟨φ⟩ instead.[3] For example, compare the various cognates of the word brother. It is the seventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after V, K, J, X, Q, and Z
), with a frequency of about 1.5% in words.

Other languages

Many other languages besides English use ⟨b⟩ to represent a

voiced bilabial stop
.

In

loanwords
.

Other systems

In the

voiced bilabial stop phone. In phonological transcription systems for specific languages, /b/ may be used to represent a lenis phoneme
, not necessarily voiced, that contrasts with fortis /p/ (which may have greater aspiration, tenseness or duration).

Other uses

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols

  • ␢ : U+2422 BLANK SYMBOL
  • ฿ : Thai baht
  • ₿ : Bitcoin
  • ♭: The flat in music, mentioned above, still closely resembles lowercase b.

Other representations

Computing

These are the code points for the forms of the letter in various systems

Character information
Preview B b
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B LATIN SMALL LETTER B
Encodings decimal hex dec hex
Unicode 66 U+0042 98 U+0062
UTF-8 66 42 98 62
Numeric character reference B B b b
EBCDIC family 194 C2 130 82
ASCII 1 66 42 98 62
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other

Notes

References

  1. ^ "B", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989
  2. ^ "B", Merriam-Webster's 3rd New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, 1993
  3. ^ a b c d e Baynes, T. S., ed. (1878), "B" , Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 3 (9th ed.), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, p. 173
  4. from the original on 30 June 2016, retrieved 11 August 2015
  5. ^ a b Miller, Kirk; Ashby, Michael (8 November 2020). "L2/20-252R: Unicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), pulmonic" (PDF).
  6. ^ Constable, Peter (30 September 2003). "L2/03-174R2: Proposal to Encode Phonetic Symbols with Middle Tilde in the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 October 2017. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
  7. ^ Constable, Peter (19 April 2004). "L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 October 2017. Retrieved 24 March 2018.
  8. ^ Everson, Michael; et al. (20 March 2002). "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 February 2018. Retrieved 24 March 2018.

External links

  • Media related to B at Wikimedia Commons
  • The dictionary definition of B at Wiktionary
  • The dictionary definition of b at Wiktionary
  • Giles, Peter (1911), "B" , Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 3 (11th ed.), p. 87
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