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This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see T (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with ㅜ, Tea, or Tee.
T
ISO basic
Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
Writing cursive forms of T

T (named tee /ˈtiː/[1]) is the 20th letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in English language texts.[2]

History

Phoenician
Taw 		Etruscan
T 		Greek
Tau

Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic Taw, Greek alphabet Tαυ (Tau), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing [t] in each of these; and it has also kept its original basic shape in all of these alphabets.

Use in writing systems

English

In English, ⟨t⟩ usually denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive (International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA: /t/), as in tart, tee, or ties, often with aspiration at the beginnings of words or before stressed vowels.

The digraph ⟨ti⟩ often corresponds to the sound /ʃ/ (a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant) word-medially when followed by a vowel, as in nation, ratio, negotiation, and Croatia.

The letter ⟨t⟩ corresponds to the affricate /t͡ʃ/ in some words as a result of yod-coalescence (for example, in words ending in "-ture", such as future).

A common digraph is ⟨th⟩, which usually represents a dental fricative, but occasionally represents /t/ (as in Thomas and thyme.)

Other languages

In the orthographies of other languages, ⟨t⟩ is often used for /t/, the voiceless dental plosive /t̪/ or similar sounds.

Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨t⟩ denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive.

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

  • 𐤕 : Semitic letter Taw, from which the following symbols originally derive
    • Τ τ : Greek letter Tau
      • Ⲧ ⲧ : Coptic letter Taw, which derives from Greek Tau
      • Т т : Cyrillic letter Te, also derived from Tau
      • 𐍄 : Gothic letter tius, which derives from Greek Tau
      • 𐌕 : Old Italic T, which derives from Greek Tau, and is the ancestor of modern Latin T
        • ᛏ : Runic letter teiwaz, which probably derives from old Italic T

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

Computing codes

Character information
Preview T t
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T     LATIN SMALL LETTER T
Encodings decimal hex dec hex
Unicode 84 U+0054 116 U+0074
UTF-8 84 54 116 74
Numeric character reference T T t t
EBCDIC family 227 E3 163 A3
ASCII 1 84 54 116 74
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

References

  1. ^ "T", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "tee", op. cit.
  2. ^ Lewand, Robert. "Relative Frequencies of Letters in General English Plain text". Cryptographical Mathematics. Central College. Retrieved 2008-06-25.
  • Media related to T at Wikimedia Commons
  • The dictionary definition of T at Wiktionary
  • The dictionary definition of t at Wiktionary
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