P
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  Cursive script 'p' and capital 'P'
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P (named pee /ˈpiː/[1] ) is the 16th letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
Contents
Usage[edit]
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/.
Arabic does not have a native phoneme /p/; the Proto-Semitic language phoneme /p/ developed into the Arabic phoneme /f/. P in modern loanwords is pronounced as /b/.[citation needed]
Most English words beginning with P are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin, Greek, and Slavic;[citation needed] 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 sp combination; PIE /*p/ is preserved after s.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [p] is used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive.
History[edit]
| Phoenician P |
Archaic Greek Pi |
Greek Pi |
Etruscan P |
Latin P |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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 |
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Related letters and other similar characters[edit]
The Latin letter P represents the same sound as the Greek letter pi, but it looks like the Greek letter rho.
- Π π : Greek letter Pi
- П п : Cyrillic letter Pe
- Ρ ρ/ϱ : Greek letter Rho
- Р р : Cyrillic letter Er
- פ ף : Hebrew letter Pe
- ℘ : script letter P, see Weierstrass p
- Ⓟ ⓟ : circled Latin letter P
- ℗ : sound recording copyright symbol
- Þ þ : Latin letter Thorn
- Ƿ ƿ : Latin letter Wynn
Computing codes[edit]
| 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[edit]
See also[edit]
- Mind your Ps and Qs
- Pence or "penny," the English slang for which is p (e.g. "20p" = 20 pence)
References[edit]
- ^ "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[edit]
Media related to P at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of P at Wiktionary- The dictionary definition of p at Wiktionary
Media related to 
The dictionary definition of |
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