B

'B' is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. In English it is pronounced ''bee'' (IPA /biː/).

Contents

History

Typography

Usage

Codes for computing

See also

History

The letter B probably started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet.

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

By 1050 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the beth.

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 (IPA ), 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 in Estonian and aspirated in Chinese and Icelandic.
Finnish does not use the letter ''b'' at all.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA, letter 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.

Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital B is codepoint U+0042 and the lowercase b is U+0062.
The ASCII code for capital B is 66 and for lowercase b is 98; or in binary 01000010 and 01100010, correspondingly.
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

★ В : Ve (Cyrillic)

★

★ B postcode area (United Kingdom)