P


P or p is the 16th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is pee, plural pees.

History

The Semitic Pê, as well as the Greek Π or π, and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized, a voiceless bilabial plosive.
Phoenician
P		Archaic Greek
Pi		Greek
Pi		Cyrillic
Pe		Etruscan
P		Latin
P

Use in writing systems

In English orthography and most other European languages, represents the sound.
A common digraph in English is, which represents the sound, and can be used to transliterate phi in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph is common, representing a labial affricate.
Most English words beginning with are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin, Greek, and Slavic; these languages preserve Proto-Indo-European initial *p. Native English cognates of such words often start with, since English is a Germanic language and thus has undergone Grimm's law; a native English word with initial would reflect Proto-Indo-European initial *b, which is so rare that its existence as a phoneme is disputed.
However, native English words with non-initial are quite common; such words can come from either Kluge's law or the consonant cluster .
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, is used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

The Latin letter P represents the same sound as the Greek letter Pi, but it looks like the Greek letter Rho.

Other representations