B


For other uses of "B", see B (disambiguation).

For technical reasons, B# redirects here. For the musical note, see B♯ (musical note)

Sister project Look up B or b in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
B
Basic Latin alphabet
  Aa Bb Cc Dd  
Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj
Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp
Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv
  Ww Xx Yy Zz  

B (b) is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /biː/) is spelled bee, plural bees.[1]

Contents

History

The letter B might have started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. By 1050 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the beth.

Egyptian hieroglyph
cottage		 Proto-Canaanite
house		 Phoenician
𐤁 beth		 Greek
Β beta		 Etruscan
𐌁 B		 Latin
B
Egyptian hieroglyphic house Proto-semitic house Phoenician beth Greek beta Etruscan B Roman B

Typography

The modern lowercase letter b derives from later Roman times, when scribes began omitting the upper loop of the capital.

Blackletter B Uncial B
Blackletter B Uncial B
Modern Roman B Modern Italic B Modern Script B
Modern Roman B Modern Italic B Modern Script B

The letter B is often confused with the visually similar German ß which stands for ss.

Usage

In English and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, the letter b denotes the voiced bilabial plosive (/b/), as in bib. In English it is sometimes silent, as in debt or comb (however the 'b' in 'comb' was actually pronounced at one time). In Estonian, Icelandic, and in Chinese transcription, B is not voiced, but is still contrasted to P, which is geminated /pp/ in Estonian and aspirated /pʰ/ in Chinese and Icelandic. In Fijian B is prenasalized IPA: [mb], whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it is implosive IPA: [ɓ], in contrast to the digraph Bh which represents IPA: [b]. Examples can be: Blue; Bubble; Block; Ball; Building

Finnish uses the letter b only for loanwords.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA, letter /b/ denotes the voiced bilabial plosive. Variants of the letter b denote related bilabial consonants, like the voiced bilabial implosive and the bilabial trill. In X-SAMPA, capital B denotes the voiced bilabial fricative.

B is also a musical note.

In Contracted (grade 2) English braille, b stands for "but" when in isolation.

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of B
NATO phonetic Morse code
Bravo –···
⠃
Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille

In Unicode the capital B is codepoint U+0042 and the lower case b is U+0062.

The ASCII code for capital B is 66 and for lower case b is 98; or in binary 01000010 and 01100010, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital B is 194 and for lowercase b is 130.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "B" and "b" for upper and lower case, respectively.

See also

Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: B

References

  1. ^ "B" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "bee", op. cit.
The Basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Letter B with diacritics
Two-letter combinations
Ba Bb Bc Bd Be Bf Bg Bh Bi Bj Bk Bl Bm Bn Bo Bp Bq Br Bs Bt Bu Bv Bw Bx By Bz
BA BB BC BD BE BF BG BH BI BJ BK BL BM BN BO BP BQ BR BS BT BU BV BW BX BY BZ
Letter-digit & Digit-letter combinations
    B0 B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9     0B 1B 2B 3B 4B 5B 6B 7B 8B 9B    

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646






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