'B' is the second letter in the
Latin alphabet. In
English it is pronounced ''bee'' (
IPA /biː/).
History
The letter B probably 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.
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 |
| Blackletter B | Uncial B |
 Modern Roman B |  Modern Italic B |  Modern Script 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 ), 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 in
Estonian and
aspirated in Chinese and Icelandic.
Finnish does not use the letter ''b'' at all.
In the
International Phonetic Alphabet and
X-SAMPA, letter 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.
Codes for computing
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.
See also
★ В :
Ve (Cyrillic)
★
★
B postcode area (United Kingdom)
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