B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled bee or occasionally be (), plural bees.^[1]

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 beth	Greek beta	Etruscan 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 (), 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. In Fijian B is prenasalized , whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it is implosive , in contrast to the digraph Bh which represents .

Finnish uses the letter b only for loanwords.

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.

B is also a musical note.

Codes for computing

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 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.

References

See also

• ?, ? : Ve (Cyrillic)
• ?, ?: Be (Cyrillic)
• B postcode area (United Kingdom)

af:B als:B ar:B arc:B ast:B az:B zh-min-nan:B bs:B br:B (lizherenn) ca:B cs:B co:B cy:B da:B de:B dv:B et:B el:B es:B eo:B eu:B fa:B fr:B (lettre) fur:B gan:B gd:B gl:B ko:B hr:B io:B ilo:B is:B it:B he:B ka:B kw:B sw:B ht:B la:B lv:B lb:B lt:B hu:B mzn:B ms:B nah:B nl:B (letter) ja:B no:B nn:B nrm:B uz:B (harf) pl:B pt:B crh:B ro:B qu:B ru:B (????????) se:B scn:B simple:B sk:B sl:B szl:B sr:B (????? ????????) fi:B sv:B tl:B th:B vi:B tr:B (harf) tk:B uk:B (????????) vo:B wuu:B yo:B zh-yue:B bat-smg:B zh:B