P
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  Cursive script 'p' and capital 'P'
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P (named pee /ˈpiː/[1] ) is the sixteenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
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Usage
In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final ‹p›s 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 ‹p›s (such as: in + pulse → impulse — see: 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/.
Arabic speakers are usually unaccustomed to pronouncing /p/; they pronounce it as /b/. In words that Arabic inherited from the Proto-Semitic language, /p/ is usually pronounced /f/.
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.
History
| Phoenician P |
Archaic Greek Pi |
Greek Pi |
Etruscan P |
Latin P |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Related letters and other similar characters
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
| 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
See also
- Mind your Ps and Qs
- Pence or "penny," the English slang for which is p (e.g. "20p" = 20 pence)
References
- ^ "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
Media related to 
The dictionary definition of | Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | ||
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Letter P with diacritics
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| Ṕṕ | Ṗṗ | Ᵽᵽ | Ƥƥ | P̃p̃ | ᵱ | ᶈ | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Related
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