B: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article

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Egyptian hieroglyph cottage	Proto-Canaanite Proto-Canaanite alphabet The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two Acrophony glyphs, found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age , by convention taken to last until a cut-off date of 1050 BC, after which it is called Phoenician alphabet.... house	Phoenician Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia.... beth Beth (Hebrew) Biblical place names beginning with Beth *Bethel "house of God " ? *Bethlehem "house of bread." Ironically, in the book of Ruth, there was a famine in Bethlehem, the "house of bread," which led Naomi's family to Moab where she met Ruth....	Greek Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE.... beta	Etruscan B	Latin B
	B
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	Topics B Topic Home For technical reasons, B# redirects here. For the musical note, see C B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin.... . Its name in English English language English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa... is spelled bee , plural bees. le class="wikitable">

modern lowercase letter b derives from later Roman

Roman cursive

Roman cursive is a form of handwriting used in ancient Rome and to some extent into the Middle Ages. It is customarily divided into old cursive, and new cursive....
times, when scribes began omitting the upper loop of the capital.

The letter B is often confused with the visually similar German

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
ß

The letter ? is a letter in the German alphabet. Its German language name is Eszett or scharfes S , and is pronounced as an unvoiced s ....
which stands for ss.

Usage
In English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, the letter b denotes the voiced bilabial plosive

Voiced bilabial plosive

Discussion

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Encyclopedia

For technical reasons, B# redirects here. For the musical note, see C B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English

English language

History

The letter B might have started as a pictogram

Pictogram

A Pictograph is a pictorial representation of an object. Earliest examples of pictographs include ancient or prehistoric drawings or paintings found on rock walls....
of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. By 1050 BC, the Phoenician alphabet

Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
's letter had a linear form that served as the beth.

Egyptian hieroglyph cottage	Proto-Canaanite Proto-Canaanite alphabet The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two Acrophony glyphs, found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age , by convention taken to last until a cut-off date of 1050 BC, after which it is called Phoenician alphabet.... house	Phoenician Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia.... beth Beth (Hebrew) Biblical place names beginning with Beth *Bethel "house of God " ? *Bethlehem "house of bread." Ironically, in the book of Ruth, there was a famine in Bethlehem, the "house of bread," which led Naomi's family to Moab where she met Ruth....	Greek Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE.... beta	Etruscan B	Latin B

Typography

The modern lowercase letter b derives from later Roman

Roman cursive


Blackletter Blackletter Blackletter, also known as Gothic scriptor Gothic minuscule, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 to 1500.... B	Uncial Uncial Uncial is a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Byzantine Empire scribes. Uncial letters are written in either Greek, Latin, or Gothic.... B

Modern Roman B	Modern Italic B	Modern Script B

The letter B is often confused with the visually similar German

German language

The letter ? is a letter in the German alphabet. Its German language name is Eszett or scharfes S , and is pronounced as an unvoiced s ....
which stands for ss.

Usage

In English

English language

Voiced bilabial plosive

The voiced bilabial plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is 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

Estonian language

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various ?migr? communities....
, Icelandic

Icelandic language

Icelandic is a North Germanic languages, the language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese language and Norwegian dialects such as Telemark dialect and Sognam?l....
, and in Chinese

Chinese language

Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of language mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan languages of languages....
transcription, B is not voiced, but is still contrasted to P, which is geminated in Estonian

Estonian language

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various ?migr? communities....
and aspirated in Chinese and Icelandic. In Fijian

Fijian language

Fijian is an Austronesian languages language of the Malayo-Polynesian languages spoken in Fiji. It has 350,000 first-language speakers, which is less than half the population of Fiji, but another 200,000 speak it as a second language....
B is prenasalized

Prenasalized consonant

Prenasalized stops or consonants are phonetics sequences of nasal consonant plus plosive consonant that behave phonology like single consonants....
, whereas in Zulu

Zulu language

Zulu , is a language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population ....
and Xhosa

Xhosa language

Xhosa is one of the official languages of South Africa. Xhosa is spoken by approximately Xhosa, or about 18% of the South African population. Like most Bantu languages, Xhosa is a Tone , that is, the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings when said with a rising or falling or high or low intonation....
it is implosive

Implosive consonant

Implosive consonants are stop consonant with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs....
, in contrast to the digraph

Digraph

Digraph may refer to:* Digraph , a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
Bh which represents .

Finnish

Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by Finnish people outside of Finland. It is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden....
uses the letter b only for loanwords.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA

X-SAMPA

The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London....
, letter denotes the voiced bilabial plosive

Voiced bilabial plosive

The voiced bilabial plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is b....
. Variants of the letter b denote related bilabial consonant

Bilabial consonant

In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
s, like the voiced bilabial implosive

Voiced bilabial implosive

A voiced bilabial implosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is b_<....
and the bilabial trill

Bilabial trill

The bilabial trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B....
. In X-SAMPA

X-SAMPA

The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London....
, capital B denotes the voiced bilabial fricative

Voiced bilabial fricative

The voiced bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B....
.

B is also a musical note.

Codes for computing

In Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
the capital B is codepoint U+0042 and the lower case b is U+0062.

The ASCII

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
code for capital B is 66 and for lower case b is 98; or in binary

Binary numeral system

The binary numeral system, or notation with a radix of 2. Owing to its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used internally by all modern computers....
01000010 and 01100010, respectively.

The EBCDIC

EBCDIC

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE , as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS ....
code for capital B is 194 and for lowercase b is 130.

The numeric character reference

Numeric character reference

A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of character s that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode....
s in HTML

HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
and XML are "B" and "b" for upper and lower case, respectively.

B

History

Typography

Usage

Codes for computing

See also