P

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see P (disambiguation).
For technical reasons, "P#" redirects here. For the programming language, see P Sharp.
For technical reasons, ":P" redirects here. For the keyboard symbol, see Emoticon.
Writing cursive forms of P

P (named pee /ˈp/[1] ) is the 16th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Phoenician
P
Archaic Greek
Pi
Greek
Pi
Etruscan
P
Latin
P

Use in writing systems

In English orthography and most other European languages, p represents the sound /p/.

A common digraph in English is ph, which represents the sound /f/, and can be used to transliterate φ phi in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph pf is common, representing a labial affricate /pf/.

Most English words beginning with p 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 f, since English is a Germanic language and thus has undergone Grimm's law; a native English word with initial /p/ 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 p are quite common; such words can come from either Kluge's law or the consonant cluster /sp/ (PIE *p has been preserved after s).

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /p/ 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.

Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols

Computing codes

Character P p
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P     LATIN SMALL LETTER P
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 80 U+0050 112 U+0070
UTF-8 80 50 112 70
Numeric character reference P P p p
EBCDIC family 215 D7 151 97
ASCII 1 80 50 112 70
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

See also

References

  1. "P", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "pee," op. cit.

External links

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