P

Writing cursive forms of P

P (named pee /ˈpiː/^[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.

• 𐤐 : Semitic letter Pe, from which the following symbols originally derive
• Π π : Greek letter Pi, from which P derives
• Ⲡ ⲡ : Coptic letter Pi
• П п : Cyrillic letter Pe, which also derives from Pi
• 𐌐 : Old Italic P, which derives from Greek Pi, and is the ancestor of modern Latin P
• 𐍀 : Gothic letter pertra/pairþa , which derives from Greek Pi
• P with diacritics: Ṕ ṕ Ṗ ṗ Ᵽ ᵽ Ƥ ƥ ᵱ

Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols

• ₱ : Philippine peso sign
• ℘ : script letter P, see Weierstrass p
• ℗ : sound recording copyright symbol
• ♇ : Pluto symbol

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

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Papa	·––·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

See also

• Mind your Ps and Qs
• Pence or "penny," the English slang for which is p (e.g. "20p" = 20 pence)

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

• Media related to P at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of P at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of p at Wiktionary