N

'N' is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is pronounced ''en'' .

Contents

History of the form

Usage

Codes for computing

Meanings of N

See also

History of the form

The most common snake hieroglyphic was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English 'J', because the Egyptian word for "snake" was ''djet''. It is speculated that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, 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, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is ''nun'', which means "fish" in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was - as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages.

Egyptian hieroglyph for 'J'	Proto-Semitic N	Phoenician N	Etruscan N	Greek Nu
D	Proto-semiticN-01.png	PhoenicianN-01.png	EtruscanN-01.png

Usage

N serves as a dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with is , which produces a velar nasal in a variety of languages, usually final in English. In languages like Italian and French, represents a palatal nasal (). 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.
N is the second-most commonly used consonant in the English language (after T).

Codes for computing

Code type	Uppercase "N" code	Lowercase "n" code
Unicode	+0043	U+006E
ASCII	78	110
Binary	01001110	01101110
EBCDIC	213	149
Numeric character reference in HTML and XML	"N"	"n"

Meanings of N

:''See N (disambiguation).''

See also

★ Ñ