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 is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled bee or occasionally be (pronounced /biː/), 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 𐤁 beth	Greek Β beta	Etruscan 𐌁 B	Latin 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
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: /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]. 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.

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of B

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Bravo		–···
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

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.

References

See also

• В : Ve (Cyrillic)
• Ɓ
• B postcode area (United Kingdom)