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45-559: B , or b , is the second letter of the Latin alphabet , used in the modern English alphabet , the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is bee (pronounced / ˈ b iː / ), plural bees . It represents the voiced bilabial stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants . The Roman ⟨B⟩ derived from

90-411: A multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,

135-513: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in

180-727: A typographic ligature (the same applies in Icelandic); examples with separate characters are Llanelli in Welsh , where Ll is a single letter; and Ffrangeg in Welsh where Ff is equivalent to English F (whereas Welsh F corresponds to English V ). Presentation forms, however, can use doubled capitals, such as the logo of the National Library of Wales ( Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru ). The position in Hungarian

225-549: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c.  1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from

270-460: A commonly preferred alternative to all caps text is the use of small caps to emphasize key names or acronyms, or the use of italics or (more rarely) bold . In addition, if all caps must be used, it is customary in headings of a few words to slightly widen the spacing between the letters, by around 10% of the point height. This practice is known as tracking or letterspacing. Compound names are nouns that are made up of more than one stem , or

315-678: A few exceptions: In most languages that use diacritics , these are treated the same way in uppercase whether the text is capitalized or all-uppercase. They may be always preserved (as in German) or always omitted (as in Greek) or often omitted (as in French). Some attribute this to the fact that diacritics on capital letters were not available earlier on typewriters, and it is now becoming more common to preserve them in French and Spanish (in both languages

360-587: A lesser extent, between different style guides . In addition to the Latin script , capitalization also affects the Armenian , Cyrillic , Georgian and Greek alphabets . The full rules of capitalization in English are complicated. The rules have also changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer words. The conventions used in an 18th-century document will be unfamiliar to a modern reader; for instance, many common nouns were capitalized. The systematic use of capitalized and uncapitalized words in running text

405-697: A stem and one or more affixes . Names that are made up of several affixes and one or more nouns are not compound names under this definition, but noun phrases , that are made up of one or more separable affixes , and one or more nouns. Examples of the separable affixes may be found in List of family name affixes . Noun phrases are in this context treated as if they were nouns. So the general rule that nouns-as-names are capitalized in principle applies to compound names and noun-phrases-as-names as well. There are, however, exceptions to this rule that differ by language community. The Chicago Manual of Style recommends that

450-672: A voiced consonant. Instead, it represents a voiceless /p/ that contrasts with either a geminated /pː/ (in Estonian) or an aspirated /p/ (in Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic and Pinyin) represented by ⟨p⟩ . In Fijian ⟨b⟩ represents a prenasalised /mb/ , whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it represents an implosive /ɓ/ , in contrast to the digraph ⟨bh⟩ which represents /b/ . Finnish uses ⟨b⟩ only in loanwords . In

495-577: Is called "mixed case". Owing to the essentially arbitrary nature of orthographic classification and the existence of variant authorities and local house styles , questionable capitalization of words is not uncommon, even in respected newspapers and magazines. Most publishers require consistency , at least within the same document, in applying a specified standard: this is described as "house style". Many languages distinguish between formal and informal 2nd-person pronouns . The capitalization of geographic terms in English text generally depends on whether

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540-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have

585-574: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Capitalization Capitalization ( American spelling ; also British spelling in Oxford) or capitalisation ( Commonwealth English ; all other meanings)

630-419: Is only at the level of house styles and individual style manuals . (See Headings and publication titles .) A simplified variant is start case , where all words, including articles , prepositions , and conjunctions , start with a capital letter. "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG." Also written as all-caps . Capital letters only. This style can be used for headlines and book or chapter titles at

675-619: Is provided for by title-case characters in Unicode. When Greek is written with the present day monotonic orthography , where only the acute accent is used, the same rule is applied. The accent is omitted in all-uppercase words but it is kept as part of an uppercase initial (written before the letter rather than above it). The dialytika (diaeresis) should also always be used in all-uppercase words (even in cases where they are not needed when writing in lowercase, e.g. ΑΫΛΟΣ — άυλος ). Some languages treat certain digraphs as single letters for

720-491: Is similar to the latter. In languages where inflected forms of a word may have extra letters at the start , the capitalized letter may be the initial of the root form rather than the inflected form. For example, in Irish , in the placename Sliabh na mBan , "(the) mountain of the women" (anglicized as Slievenamon ), the word-form written mBan contains the genitive plural of the noun bean , "woman", mutated after

765-479: Is the case do not capitalize. ("The Tatra National Park is a tourist destination in Poland. Watch out for bears when visiting the national park.") The following names are given to systems of capitalization: " The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ." The standard case used in English prose . Generally equivalent to the baseline universal standard of formal English orthography mentioned above; that is, only

810-423: Is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction . The term also may refer to the choice of the casing applied to text. Conventional writing systems ( orthographies ) for different languages have different conventions for capitalization, for example, the capitalization of titles. Conventions also vary, to

855-508: The APA style guide instructs: Capitalize major words in titles of books and articles within the body of the paper. Conjunctions, articles, and short prepositions are not considered major words; however, capitalize all words of four letters or more. In other languages, such as the Romance languages , only the first word and proper names are capitalized. Acronyms are usually capitalized, with

900-572: The English cursive B were developed by the 17th century. In English , ⟨b⟩ denotes the voiced bilabial stop /b/ , as in bib . In English, it is sometimes silent . This occurs particularly in words ending in ⟨mb⟩ , such as lamb and bomb , some of which originally had a /b/ sound, while some had the letter ⟨b⟩ added by analogy (see Phonological history of English consonant clusters ). The ⟨b⟩ in debt , doubt , subtle , and related words

945-734: The European Union , the Republic of Poland , the North Atlantic , the Middle East , the Arctic , The Gambia , The Bahamas , The Hague Lower case : western China, southern Beijing, western Mongolia, eastern Africa, northern North Korea, the central Gobi, the lower Yangtze River. Abbreviated When a term is used as a name and then subsequently a shorter term is used, then that shorter term may be used generically. If that

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990-578: The Greek capital beta ⟨ Β ⟩ via its Etruscan and Cumaean variants. The Greek letter was an adaptation of the Phoenician letter bēt ⟨ 𐤁 ⟩ . The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf ⟨  [REDACTED]  ⟩ , but bēt (Phoenician for "house") was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ⟨  [REDACTED]  ⟩ adapted from

1035-615: The Gregorian and Irish missions gradually developed into the Insular scripts ' ⟨ [REDACTED] ⟩ . These Old English Latin alphabets supplanted the earlier runes, whose use was fully banned under King Canute in the early 11th century. The Norman Conquest popularised the Carolingian half-uncial forms which latter developed into blackletter ⟨  [REDACTED]  ⟩ . Around 1300, letter case

1080-616: The International Phonetic Alphabet , [b] is used to represent the voiced bilabial stop phone . In phonological transcription systems for specific languages, /b/ may be used to represent a lenis phoneme , not necessarily voiced, that contrasts with fortis /p/ (which may have greater aspiration, tenseness or duration). The Latin letters ⟨B⟩ and ⟨b⟩ have Unicode encodings U+0042 B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B and U+0062 b LATIN SMALL LETTER B . These are

1125-645: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c.  3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c.  1800 BCE , representing

1170-624: The Latin ⟨B⟩ have separate encodings: U+0412 В CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER VE and U+0392 Β GREEK CAPITAL LETTER BETA . [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes , the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called

1215-727: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c.  900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet

1260-557: The author perceives the term as a proper noun , in which case it is capitalized, or as a combination of an established proper noun with a normal adjective or noun, in which case the latter are not capitalized. There are no universally agreed lists of English geographic terms which are considered as proper nouns. The following are examples of rules that some British and U.S. publishers have established in style guides for their authors: Upper case : East Asia , Southeast Asia , Central Asia , Central America , North Korea , South Africa ,

1305-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage

1350-629: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩

1395-781: The first word is capitalized, except for proper nouns and other words which are generally capitalized by a more specific rule. A variation is mid-sentence case which is identical to sentence case except that the first word is not capitalized (unless it would be capitalized by another rule). This type of letter case is used for entries in dictionaries . "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog." Also known as headline case and capital case . All words capitalized, except for certain subsets defined by rules that are not universally standardized, often minor words such as "the" (as above), "of", or "and". Other commonly lowercase words are prepositions and coordinating conjunctions. The standardization

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1440-522: The genitive plural definite article (i.e., "of the"). The written B is mute in this form. Other languages may capitalize the initial letter of the orthographic word, even if it is not present in the base, as with definite nouns in Maltese that start with certain consonant clusters. For example, l-Istati Uniti (the United States) capitalize the epenthetic I , even though the base form of

1485-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and

1530-471: The purpose of collation. In general, where one such is formed as a ligature , the corresponding uppercase form is used in capitalization; where it is written as two separate characters, only the first will be capitalized. Thus Oedipus or Œdipus are both correct, but OEdipus is not. Examples with ligature include Ærøskøbing in Danish , where Æ/æ is a completely separate letter rather than merely

1575-457: The rule is to preserve them, although in France and Mexico, for instance, schoolchildren are often erroneously taught that they should not add diacritics on capital letters). However, in the polytonic orthography used for Greek prior to 1982, accents were omitted in all-uppercase words, but kept as part of an uppercase initial (written before rather than above the letter). The latter situation

1620-594: The same code points as those used in ASCII and ISO 8859 . There are also precomposed character encodings for ⟨B⟩ and ⟨b⟩ with diacritics, for most of those listed above ; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics . Variant forms of the letter have unique code points for specialist use: the alphanumeric symbols set in mathematics and science, Latin beta in linguistics, and halfwidth and fullwidth forms for legacy CJK font compatibility. The Cyrillic and Greek homoglyphs of

1665-453: The same sound, so a modified form known as be ⟨ Б ⟩ was developed to represent the Slavic languages ' /b/ . (Modern Greek continues to lack a letter for the voiced bilabial plosive and transliterates such sounds from other languages using the digraph / consonant cluster ⟨ μπ ⟩ , mp .) Old English was originally written in runes , whose equivalent letter

1710-413: The separate hieroglyph Pr ⟨ [REDACTED] ⟩ meaning "house". The Hebrew letter bet ⟨ ב ⟩ is a separate development of the Phoenician letter. By Byzantine times , the Greek letter ⟨ Β ⟩ came to be pronounced /v/ , so that it is known in modern Greek as víta (still written βήτα ). The Cyrillic letter ve ⟨ В ⟩ represents

1755-513: The titles of English-language artistic works (plays, novels, essays, paintings, etc.) capitalize the first word and the last word in the title. Additionally, most other words within a title are capitalized as well; articles and coordinating conjunctions are not capitalized. Sources disagree on the details of capitalizing prepositions . For example, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends rendering all prepositions in lowercase, whereas

1800-415: The top of a book page. It is commonly used in transcribed speech to indicate that a person is shouting, or to indicate a hectoring and obnoxious speaker. For this reason, it is generally discouraged. Long spans of Latin-alphabet text in all uppercase are harder to read because of the absence of the ascenders and descenders found in lowercase letters, which can aid recognition. In professional documents,

1845-505: The various cognates of the word brother . It is the seventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after V , K , J , X , Q , and Z ), with a frequency of about 1.5% in words. Many other languages besides English use ⟨b⟩ to represent a voiced bilabial stop . In Estonian , Danish , Faroese , Icelandic , Scottish Gaelic and Mandarin Chinese Pinyin , ⟨b⟩ does not denote

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1890-463: Was beorc ⟨ ᛒ ⟩ , meaning " birch ". Beorc dates to at least the 2nd-century Elder Futhark , which is now thought to have derived from the Old Italic alphabets ' ⟨  𐌁  ⟩ either directly or via Latin ⟨ [REDACTED] ⟩ . The uncial ⟨ [REDACTED] ⟩ and half-uncial ⟨ [REDACTED] ⟩ introduced by

1935-481: Was added in the 16th century as an etymological spelling , intended to make the words more like their Latin originals ( debitum , dubito , subtilis ). As /b/ is one of the sounds subject to Grimm's Law , words which have ⟨b⟩ in English and other Germanic languages may find their cognates in other Indo-European languages appearing with ⟨bh⟩ , ⟨p⟩ , ⟨f⟩ or ⟨φ⟩ instead. For example, compare

1980-584: Was increasingly distinguished, with upper- and lower-case B taking separate meanings. Following the advent of printing in the 15th century, the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) and Scandinavia continued to use forms of blackletter (particularly Fraktur ), while England eventually adopted the humanist and antiqua scripts developed in Renaissance Italy from a combination of Roman inscriptions and Carolingian texts. The present forms of

2025-508: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in

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