B
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Look up B, b in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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.

B is also a musical note.

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of B

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Bravo	–···

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

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

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

B

• В, в : Ve (Cyrillic)
• Б, б: Be (Cyrillic)
• The Semitic letter Bet
• Ɓ
• B postcode area (United Kingdom)