B

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.
This article has been tagged since July 2007.
For other uses of "B", see B (disambiguation).
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. In English it is pronounced bee (IPA /biː/).

Contents

  • 1 History
  • 2 Typography
  • 3 Usage
  • 4 Codes for computing
  • 5 See also

[edit] History

The letter B probably started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-semitic alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyph
cottage		 Proto-Semitic
house		 Phoenician
beth		 Greek
beta		 Etruscan
B		 Roman
B

By 1500 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the beth.

[edit] 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".

[edit] 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 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.

[edit] Codes for computing

Alternative representations of B
NATO phonetic Morse code
Bravo –···
Signal 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.