The letter B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is bee .

History

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The letter B probably started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-semitic alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyph house	Proto-Semitic house	Phoenician beth	Greek beta	Etruscan	Roman B	-

By 1500 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the basis for all later, which appeared in both the angular and more rounded forms. Its name must have corresponded closely to the Hebrew beth.

When the Ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they changed its name to beta and turned the letter upside-down and later added a second loop. In earlier Greek inscriptions, the letter faces to the left, but in the Greek alphabet of later times it faces to the right, although there continued to be variations between pointed and rounded loops.

The Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to what is now Italy and left the letter unchanged. The Romans later adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write Latin, and the resulting letter, with rounded loops, has been preserved in the modern Latin alphabet used to write many languages, including English.

Typography

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The modern lowercase letter b derives from later Roman times, when scribes began omitting the upper loop of the capital.

Blackletter B	Uncial B
Modern Roman B	Modern Italic B	Modern Script B

The letter B should not be confused with the visually similar German ß.

Usage

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In English and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, the letter b denotes the voiced bilabial plosive (IPA ), as in bib. In English it is sometimes "silent", as in debt or comb. In medial position in Spanish it denotes the voiced bilabial fricative (IPA ). In Estonian, Icelandic, and in Chinese transcription, B is not voiced, but is still contrasted to P, which is a geminate in Estonian and an aspirate in Chinese and Icelandic.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA, letter denotes the voiced bilabial plosive. Variants of the letter b denote related bilabial consonants, like the voiced bilabial implosive and the bilabial trill. In X-SAMPA, capital B denotes the voiced bilabial fricative.

Codes for computing

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In Unicode the capital B is codepoint U+0042 and the lowercase b is U+0062.

The ASCII code for capital B is 66 and for lowercase b is 98; or in binary 01000010 and 01100010, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital B is 194 and for lowercase b is 130.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "B" and "b" for upper and lower case respectively.

Meanings for B

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• As a prefix B indicates second rate (where A is first/top rate) e.g. B-movie, B-team.
• In astronomy,
  • B stands for a January 16 through 31 discovery, in the provisional designation of a comet (e.g. C/1865 B1, the Great Southern Comet of 1865) or asteroid (e.g. (4156) 1988 BE).
  • b often denotes the semi-minor axis of an orbit.
• In aviation, B (followed by a -) is the ICAO prefix for civil aircraft registered in China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.
• Brassiere cup size B.
• In chemistry, B is the symbol for the chemical element boron.
• In chess, B is a notation symbol (descriptive style) for the bishop piece.
• In the RGB color model, B stands for the color blue.
• In computer science and computing,
  • b is an alternate symbol for bit (IEEE 1541; IEC 60027 recommends "bit" instead).
  • B is the usual symbol for byte (IEEE 1541 and IEC 60027). It is a fairly common error to use a lowercase b instead.
  • B is the name of the B programming language and the B-Method, a leading formal method.
  • and are the HTML tags for marking the start and end of boldface type.
  • $\backslash mathbb\{B\}$ can be used to indicate a Boolean type, especially in formal specifications.
  • B is a security division ("Mandatory Protection") in the TCSEC.
  • A b-tree is a binary tree, a type of indexed data structure.
• In the diaries of Edwina Currie, B was the code name for John Major with whom the author was having an affair.
• In education, B is a "good" grade, one below the top grade of A.
• In electrical engineering,
  • B is the anode (plate) power supply (originally a battery) of vacuum tube circuitry.
  • B is the symbol for susceptance, the inverse of reactance.
• In English slang, B is a euphemism for bastard or bitch.
• In film, the term "B," as in B-movie, referred to the less noteworthy film in a double feature and currently refers to any low quality, low profile film.
  • B is also the name given to the costume designer for the movies Spun and Domino.
• In finance, B is the New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol for Barnes Group Inc..
• In international licence plate codes, B stands for Belgium.
• In international paper sizes, B is a series of sizes with sides of even fractions of a metre. The B series is a scaled version of the A series.
• In mathematics,
  • B represents the base of a geometric figure.
  • B is often used as a digit meaning eleven in hexadecimal and other positional numeral systems with a radix of 12 or greater.
  • $\backslash mathbb\{B\}$ in Blackboard bold notation represents Ball (mathematics).
  • B may denote Brun's constant, which equals ~1.902160583104.
• In medicine, B (also, B+ or B-) is one of the human blood types.
• In metrology,
  • B was sometimes used in the early twentieth century as a prefix for "billion" (e.g. BeV).
  • B was the symbol for the candle (from the French bougie), a unit of luminous intensity.
  • b was the symbol for the barn, a unit of effective cross-section in particle physics.
• In music,
  • B is a note.
  • B, or "B-side", is the second or reverse side of a vinyl record; also called the flip side.
• In the North American National Hockey League, the Boston Bruins are sometimes referred to as the "Bs" because of the letter B on the front of their jerseys.
• In nutrition, B refers to a group of vitamins.
• In photography, B is a shutter speed.
• In physics,
  • The vector B represents the magnetic field.
  • The symbol B stands for the unit bel.
  • The bottom quark is represented with small "b", the B meson is represented with capital "B".
  • b stands for the Wien displacement law constant.
• As the first letter of a postal code,
  • In Canada, B stands for Nova Scotia.
  • In the United Kingdom, B stands for Birmingham.
• In radiocommunication, B is the ITU prefix allocated to China.
• In rail transport, B is the UIC classification for the locomotive wheel arrangement known as 0-4-0 in the Whyte notation; a locomotive with two powered axles (and thus four wheels) in which the axles are linked by gearing or side rods.
• On the serial numbers of United States dollars, B identifies the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
• B is the letter that was the beginning of The Clock Crew, due to it being featured in a movie by StrawberryClock on Newgrounds
• /b/ is the random board on several imageboards, such as 4chan, 2chan, iichan, and 420chan.

• B is also seen as the unlucky letter of alphabet, as it looks like an scratched together thirteen.

See also

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• В : Ve (Cyrillic)
• В the Movie on Newgrounds

Latin letters

B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B (letter) | B | B | B | B | B | B (латиница) | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B | B