P

ISO basic Latin alphabet Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

Cursive script 'p' and capital 'P'

P (named pee /ˈpiː/^[1] ) is the sixteenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

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/. 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.

History

Phoenician P	Archaic Greek Pi	Greek Pi	Etruscan P	Latin P

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

¹ Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Papa	·––·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

See also

• Mind your Ps and Qs
• Pence or "penny," the English slang for which is p (e.g. "20p" = 20 pence)

References

External links

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