'P' is the sixteenth letter of the modern
Latin alphabet. In
English, its name is pronounced ''pee'' ( in the
International Phonetic Alphabet). Its uppercase version is visually similar to the uppercase of the Greek letter ''
rho'' (Ρ) and Cyrillic letter ''
er'' (Ð ).
History
The Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek Πor π (
Pi), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized , a
voiceless bilabial plosive.
Usage
In
English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete
consonants in English words. A common example of
assimilation 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).
A common digraph in English is "ph", which represents the
voiceless labiodental fricative , and can be used to transliterate
Phi (φ) in loanwords from
Greek. 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 instead.
Codes for computing
In
Unicode, the
capital "P" is codepoint U+0050 and the
lowercase "p" is U+0070.
The
ASCII code for capital "P" is 80 and for lowercase "p" is 112; or, in
binary, 01010000 and 01110000, respectively.
The
EBCDIC code for capital "P" is 215 and for lowercase "p" is 151.
The
numeric character references in
HTML and
XML are "
P" and "
p" for upper and lower case, respectively.
See also
★
Þþ
★
â„— or (P)