B


B or b is the second letter of the Latin-script alphabet. Its name in English is bee, 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.

History

Uncial
B		Insular
B		Blackletter
B		Antiqua
B		Modern Roman
B

Old English was originally written in runes, whose equivalent letter was beorc, meaning "birch". Beorc dates to at least the 2nd-century Elder Futhark, which is now thought to have derived from the Old Italic alphabets' either directly or via Latin.
The uncial and half-uncial introduced by the Gregorian and Irish missions gradually developed into the Insular scripts'. 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. Around 1300, letter case was increasingly distinguished, with upper- and lower-case B taking separate meanings. Following the advent of printing in the 15th century, Holy Roman Empire and Scandinavia continued to use forms of blackletter, 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 the English cursive B were developed by the 17th century.
or early Baroque design of a B, from 1627
The Roman derived from the Greek capital beta via its Etruscan and Cumaean variants. The Greek letter was an adaptation of the Phoenician letter bēt. The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf, but bēt was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph probably adapted from the separate hieroglyph Pr meaning "house". The Hebrew letter beth is a separate development of the Phoenician letter.
By Byzantine times, the Greek letter came to be pronounced /v/, so that it is known in modern Greek as víta. The Cyrillic letter ve represents the same sound, so a modified form known as be was developed to represent the Slavic languages' /b/.

Use in writing systems

English

In English, denotes the voiced bilabial stop, as in bib. In English, it is sometimes silent. This occurs particularly in words ending in, such as lamb and bomb, some of which originally had a /b/ sound, while some had the letter added by analogy. The in debt, doubt, subtle, and related words was added in the 16th century as an etymological spelling, intended to make the words more like their Latin originals.
As /b/ is one of the sounds subject to Grimm's Law, words which have in English and other Germanic languages may find their cognates in other Indo-European languages appearing with,, or instead. For example, compare the various cognates of the word. It is the seventh least frequently used letter in the English language, with a frequency of about 1.5% in words.

Other languages

Many other languages besides English use to represent a voiced bilabial stop.
In Estonian, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic and Chinese Pinyin, does not denote a voiced consonant. Instead, it represents a voiceless that contrasts with either a geminated or an aspirated represented by. In Fijian represents a prenasalised, whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it represents an implosive, in contrast to the digraph which represents. Finnish uses only in loanwords.

Phonetic transcription

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, 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/.

Other uses

is also a musical note. In English-speaking countries, it represents Si, the 12th note of a chromatic scale built on C. In Central Europe and Scandinavia, "B" is used to denote B-flat and the 12th note of the chromatic scale is denoted "H". Archaic forms of 'b', the b quadratum and b rotundum are used in musical notation as the symbols for natural and flat, respectively.
In Contracted English braille, 'b' stands for "but" when in isolation.
In computer science, B is the symbol for byte, a unit of information storage.
In engineering, B is the symbol for bel, a unit of level.
In chemistry, B is the symbol for boron, a chemical element.
The blood-type B emoji was added in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, and became a popular internet meme in 2018 where letters would be replaced with the emoji.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Other representations