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N is the fourteenth 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 en .

of the most common snake
Snake

Snakes are elongate legless carnivore reptiles of the suborder Serpentes that can be distinguished from legless lizards by their lack of eyelids and external ears....
 hieroglyph
Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements....
 was used in Egypt
Egypt

Egypt is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia. Covering an area of about , Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west....
ian writing to stand for a sound like English “J
J

J or j is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative , and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, , or the voiced retroflex fricative, ....
,” because the Egyptian word for “snake” was djet. It is speculated that Semitic
Semitic

In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....
 people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet
Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for “snake” may have begun with that sound.






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N is the fourteenth 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 en .

History of the forms

One of the most common snake
Snake

Snakes are elongate legless carnivore reptiles of the suborder Serpentes that can be distinguished from legless lizards by their lack of eyelids and external ears....
 hieroglyph
Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements....
 was used in Egypt
Egypt

Egypt is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia. Covering an area of about , Egypt borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south and Libya to the west....
ian writing to stand for a sound like English “J
J

J or j is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative , and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, , or the voiced retroflex fricative, ....
,” because the Egyptian word for “snake” was djet. It is speculated that Semitic
Semitic

In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....
 people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet
Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for “snake” may have begun with that sound. However, the name for the letter in the 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....
, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun
Nun (letter)

Nun is the fourteenth letter of many Semitic language abjads, including Phoenician language, Aramaic language, Hebrew language and Arabic alphabet ....
, which means “fish
Fish

A fish is any marine biology vertebrate animal that is typically ectothermic , covered with scale , and equipped with two sets of paired fins and several unpaired fins....
” in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was —as in Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
, Etruscan
Etruscan language

The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna , in Italy....
, Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 and all modern languages.

Usage

N represents the dental
Dental nasal

The dental nasal 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 n_d....
 or alveolar nasal
Alveolar nasal

The alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental consonant, alveolar consonant, and postalveolar consonant nasal consonant is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is n....
 in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with is , which represents a velar nasal
Velar nasal

The velar nasal 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 N....
 in a variety of languages, usually positioned word-finally 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...
. In languages like Italian and French, represents a palatal nasal
Palatal nasal

The palatal nasal is a type of consonant, 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 J....
 . The Portuguese spelling for this sound is . In English, n is silent when it is preceded by an m, in words like hymn (although it is pronounced in words such as damnation).

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the lowercase represents the alveolar nasal sound. A small capital represents the uvular nasal
Uvular nasal

The uvular nasal 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 N....
.

N is the second-most commonly used consonant
Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper vocal tract, the upper vocal tract being defined as that part of the vocal tract that lies above the larynx....
 in the English language
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...
 (after T
T

T is the twentieth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled tee . It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language....
).

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 N is codepoint U+004E and the lower case n is U+006E.

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 N is 78 and for lowercase n is 110; 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....
 01001110 and 01101110, correspondingly.

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 N is 213 and for lowercase n is 149.

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 "N" and "n" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

  • N
    N

    N is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled en ....
  • Ń
    N

    N is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled en ....
  • N
    N

    N is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled en ....
  • ?, ? (?, ?) - Pe (Cyrillic)
    Pe (Cyrillic)

    eading=Cyrillic letter Pe|Image=...
  • ?, ? (?, ?) - En (Cyrillic)
    En (Cyrillic)

    eading=Cyrillic letter En|Image=...
  • ?, ? - Nu (Greek)
    Nu (letter)

    Nu , is the 13th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 50. Its Latin Alphabet equivalent is N, though the lowercase resembles the Roman lowercase v....