This article is about the letter of the Latin alphabet. For the similar Greek letter, see Beta. For the similar Cyrillic letter, see Ve (Cyrillic). For the German letter confused with "B", see ß. For other uses, see B (disambiguation).
By Byzantine times, the Greek letter ⟨Β⟩ came to be pronounced /v/,[3] so that it is known in modern Greek as víta (still written βήτα). The Cyrillic letter ve⟨В⟩ represents the same sound, so a modified form known as be⟨Б⟩ was developed to represent the Slavic languages' /b/.[3] (Modern Greek continues to lack a letter for the voiced bilabial plosive and transliterates such sounds from other languages using the digraph/consonant cluster⟨μπ⟩, mp.)
In English, ⟨b⟩ denotes the voiced bilabial stop/b/, as in bib. In English, it is sometimes silent. This occurs particularly in words ending in ⟨mb⟩, such as lamb and bomb, some of which originally had a /b/ sound, while some had the letter ⟨b⟩ added by analogy (see Phonological history of English consonant clusters). The ⟨b⟩ in debt, doubt, subtle, and related words was added in the 16th century as an etymological spelling, intended to make the words more like their Latin originals (debitum, dubito, subtilis).
A metal letter "B" with a mantispid standing on it
As /b/ is one of the sounds subject to Grimm's Law, words which have ⟨b⟩ in English and other Germanic languages may find their cognates in other Indo-European languages appearing with ⟨bh⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨f⟩ or ⟨φ⟩ instead.[3] For example, compare the various cognates of the word brother. It is the seventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 1.5% in words.
Other languages
Many other languages besides English use ⟨b⟩ to represent a voiced bilabial stop.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [b] is used to represent the voiced bilabial stopphone. In phonological transcription systems for specific languages, /b/ may be used to represent a lenisphoneme, not necessarily voiced, that contrasts with fortis /p/ (which may have greater aspiration, tenseness or duration).
In the base-16 numbering system, B is a number that corresponds to the number 11 in decimal (base 10) counting.
B is a musical note. In English-speaking countries, it represents Si, the 12th note of a chromatic scale built on C. In Central Europe and Scandinavia, "B" is used to denote B-flat and the 12th note of the chromatic scale is denoted "H". Archaic forms of 'b', the b quadratum (square b, ♮) and b rotundum (round b, ♭) are used in musical notation as the symbols for natural and flat, respectively.
In Contracted (grade 2) English braille, ⟨b⟩ stands for "but" when in isolation.
In computer science, B is the symbol for byte, a unit of information storage.
In engineering, B is the symbol for bel, a unit of level.
♭: The flat in music, mentioned above, still closely resembles lowercase b.
Other representations
Computing
The Latin letters ⟨B⟩ and ⟨b⟩ have Unicode encodings U+0042BLATIN CAPITAL LETTER B and U+0062bLATIN SMALL LETTER B. These are the same code points as those used in ASCII and ISO 8859. There are also precomposed character encodings for ⟨B⟩ and ⟨b⟩ with diacritics, for most of those listed above; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics.
