P (minuscule: p) is the sixteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is pee (pronounced /ˈpiː/ ⓘ), plural pees.

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.

EgyptianProto-SinaiticProto-Canaanite pʿitPhoenician PeWestern Greek PiEtruscan PLatin P
Late Renaissance or early Baroque design of a P, from 1627

Use in writing systems

Pronunciation of ⟨p⟩ by language
OrthographyPhonemes
Catalan/p/
Standard Chinese (Pinyin)/pʰ/
English/p/, silent
French/p/, silent
German/p/
Portuguese/p/
Spanish/p/
Turkish/p/

English

In English orthography, ⟨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 and Greek; these languages preserve the 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 an 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).

P is the eighth least frequently used letter in the English language.

Other languages

In most European languages, ⟨p⟩ represents the sound /p/.

Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨p⟩ is used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive.

Other uses

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 𐌐 : Old Italic and Old Latin P, which derives from Greek Pi, and is the ancestor of modern Latin P. The Roman P had this form (𐌐) on coins and inscriptions until the reign of Claudius, c.50 AD. 𐍀 : Gothic letter pertra/pairþa, which derives from Greek Pi П п : Cyrillic letter Pe, which derives from Greek Pi Ⲡ ⲡ : Coptic letter Pi Պ պ: Armenian letter Pe
  • P with diacritics: Ṕ ṕ Ṗ ṗ Ᵽ ᵽ Ƥ ƥ ᵱ ᶈ
  • Turned P: P d, an additional letter of the Latin script not encoded in Unicode
  • Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to P: U+1D18ᴘ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL P U+1D3Eᴾ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL P U+1D56ᵖ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL P
  • p : Subscript small p was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902

Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols

Other representations

Computing

  • U+0050P LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P

Other

NATO phoneticMorse code
Papaⓘ
Signal flagFlag semaphoreAmerican manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling)British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling)Unified English Braille

See also

External links

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