- For technical reasons, B# redirects here. For the musical note, see B♯ (musical note)
‹B› is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈbiː/) is spelled bee, plural bees.[1] It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds (depending on language), most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.
History
‹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.
Typography
The modern lowercase ‹b› derives from later Roman times, when scribes began omitting the upper loop of the capital.
‹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, ‹b› denotes the voiced bilabial plosive (/b/), as in bib. In English it is sometimes silent, as in debt or comb. In Estonian, Icelandic, and in Chinese transcription, ‹b› does not denote a voiced consonant; instead, it represents a voiceless /p/ that contrasts with either a geminated /pp/ (in Estonian) or an aspirated /pʰ/ (in Chinese and Icelandic), represented by ‹p›. In Fijian ‹b› represents a prenasalized /mb/, whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it represents an implosive /ɓ/, in contrast to the digraph ‹bh› which represents /b/.
Finnish only uses ‹b› in loanwords.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA, ‹b› denotes the voiced bilabial plosive. Variants of ‹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. Its value varies depending on the region; a ‹b› in Anglophone countries represents a note that is a semitone higher than the B note in Northern Continental Europe. (Anglophone B is represented in Northern Europe with ‹H›.) Archaic forms of ‹b›, the b quadratum (square b, ♮) and b rotundum (round b, ♭) remain in use for musical notation as the symbols for flat and natural, respectively.
In Contracted (grade 2) English braille, ‹b› stands for "but" when in isolation.
Codes for computing
Alternative representations of B
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 lower case ‹b› is 98; or in binary 01000010 and 01100010, respectively.
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
References
- ^ "B" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "bee", op. cit.
