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P is the sixteenth letter of the modern 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 pronounced pee .

Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek ? or p (Pi
Pi (letter)

Pi is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 80. Letters that arose from pi include Cyrillic Pe ....
), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized , a voiceless bilabial plosive
Voiceless bilabial plosive

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

a class="link1" onMouseover='showByLink("m1426620",this)' onMouseout='hide("m1426620")'href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/English_language">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 European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive
Voiceless bilabial plosive

The voiceless bilabial plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is p....
. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete 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....
s in English words.






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P is the sixteenth letter of the modern 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 pronounced pee .

History

The Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek ? or p (Pi
Pi (letter)

Pi is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 80. Letters that arose from pi include Cyrillic Pe ....
), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized , a voiceless bilabial plosive
Voiceless bilabial plosive

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

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 European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive
Voiceless bilabial plosive

The voiceless bilabial plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is p....
. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete 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....
s in English words. A common example of assimilation
Assimilation (linguistics)

Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word . A common example of assimilation would be "don't be silly" where the and in "don't" become and , where said naturally in many accents and discourse styles ....
 is the tendency of prefixes ending in N to assume an M sound before Ps (such as "in" + "pulse" ? "impulse" — see also List of Latin words with English derivatives
List of Latin words with English derivatives

This is a list of Latin words with derivatives in English .Note that ancient orthography did not distinguish between i and j or between u and v....
).

A common digraph in English is "ph", which represents the voiceless labiodental fricative
Voiceless labiodental fricative

The voiceless labiodental 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 f....
 , and can be used to transliterate Phi
PHI

PHI is a three-letter acronym or abbreviation that can refer to:* Post-Polio Health International* Protected Health Information as part of the HIPAA regulations...
 (f) in loanwords from 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....
. In German, the digraph "pf" is common, representing a labial affricate of .

Those who speak Arabic are usually unaccustomed to pronouncing ; they pronounce it as .

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 "P" is codepoint U+0050 and the lower case "p" is U+0070.

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 "P" is 80 and for lowercase "p" is 112; 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....
, 01010000 and 01110000, 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 "P" is 215 and for lowercase "p" is 151.

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 "P" and "p" for upper and lower case, respectively.

See also

  • Þ or þ
    Thorn (letter)

    Thorn, or ?orn , is a letter in the Old English language and Icelandic alphabet alphabets. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from the runic alphabet in the Elder Fu?ark, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune...
  • ? or (P)
    Sound recording copyright symbol

    The ? symbol, a circled P, is the copyright symbol used to provide notice of copyright in a sound recording . The use of the symbol is described by United States copyright law, and, internationally, by the Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms....
  • ?, ? - Pe (Cyrillic)
    Pe (Cyrillic)

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

    eading=Cyrillic letter Er|Image=...
  • ?, p - Pi (Greek)
    Pi (letter)

    Pi is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 80. Letters that arose from pi include Cyrillic Pe ....
  • ?, ? - Pe (Hebrew)
    Pe (letter)

    Pe is the seventeenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician language, Aramaic language, Hebrew language Pei , Persian alphabet Pe and Arabic alphabet ....