P

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Look up P, p in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd   Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv   Ww Xx Yy Zz

P is the sixteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled pee or occasionally pe (pronounced /piː/).^[1]

[edit] History

The Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek Π or π (Pi), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized /p/, a voiceless bilabial plosive.

[edit] Usage

In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words. A common example of assimilation is the tendency of prefixes ending in N to assume an M sound before Ps (such as "in" + "pulse" → "impulse" — see also List of Latin words with English derivatives).

A common digraph in English is "ph", which represents the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/, and can be used to transliterate Phi (φ) in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph "pf" is common, representing a labial affricate of /pf/.

Those who speak Arabic are usually unaccustomed to pronouncing /p/; they pronounce it as /b/ or /v/ instead.

[edit] Codes for computing

Alternative representations of P

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Papa		·––·
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

In Unicode, the capital "P" is codepoint U+0050 and the lower case "p" is U+0070.

The ASCII code for capital "P" is 80 and for lowercase "p" is 112; or, in binary, 01010000 and 01110000, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital "P" is 215 and for lowercase "p" is 151.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "P" and "p" for upper and lower case, respectively.

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

P

• Þ or þ
• ℗ or (P)
• П, п - Pe (Cyrillic)
• Р, р - Er (Cyrillic)
• Π, π - Pi (Greek)

[edit] 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.