In the International Phonetic Alphabet, is used to represent the voiced bilabial stop phone. In Fijian ⟨b⟩ represents a prenasalised /mb/, whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it represents an implosive /ɓ/, in contrast to the digraph ⟨bh⟩ which represents /b/. Instead, it represents a voiceless /p/ that contrasts with either a geminated /p:/ (in Estonian) or an aspirated /p h/ (in Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic and Pinyin) represented by ⟨p⟩.

In Estonian, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic and Mandarin Chinese Pinyin, ⟨b⟩ does not denote a voiced consonant. Many other languages besides English use ⟨b⟩ to represent a voiced bilabial stop. It is the seventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 1.5% in words.

For example, compare the various cognates of the word brother. The ⟨b⟩ in debt, doubt, subtle, and related words was added in the 16th century as an etymological spelling, intended to make the words more like their Latin originals ( debitum, dubito, subtilis).Ī metal letter 'B' with a mantispid standing on itĪs /b/ is one of the sounds subject to Grimm's Law, words which have ⟨b⟩ in English and other Germanic languages may find their cognates in other Indo-European languages appearing with ⟨bh⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨f⟩ or ⟨φ⟩ instead. This occurs particularly in words ending in ⟨mb⟩, such as lamb and bomb, some of which originally had a /b/ sound, while some had the letter ⟨b⟩ added by analogy (see Phonological history of English consonant clusters). In English, ⟨b⟩ denotes the voiced bilabial stop /b/, as in bib. Late Renaissance or early Baroque design of a B, from 1627 Use in writing systems English The present forms of the English cursive B were developed by the 17th century. Following the advent of printing in the 15th century, Holy Roman Empire (Germany) and Scandinavia continued to use forms of blackletter (particularly Fraktur), while England eventually adopted the humanist and antiqua scripts developed in Renaissance Italy from a combination of Roman inscriptions and Carolingian texts. Around 1300, letter case was increasingly distinguished, with upper- and lower-case B taking separate meanings. The Norman Conquest popularised the Carolingian half-uncial forms which latter developed into blackletter ⟨ ⟩. These Old English Latin alphabets supplanted the earlier runes, whose use was fully banned under King Canute in the early 11th century. The uncial ⟨ ⟩ and half-uncial ⟨ ⟩ introduced by the Gregorian and Irish missions gradually developed into the Insular scripts' ⟨ ⟩. Beorc dates to at least the 2nd-century Elder Futhark, which is now thought to have derived from the Old Italic alphabets' ⟨ 𐌁 ⟩ either directly or via Latin ⟨ ⟩. Old English was originally written in runes, whose equivalent letter was beorc ⟨ ᛒ⟩, meaning ' birch'. (Modern Greek continues to lack a letter for the voiced bilabial plosive and transliterates such sounds from other languages using the digraph/ consonant cluster ⟨ μπ⟩, mp.) The Cyrillic letter ve ⟨ В⟩ represents the same sound, so a modified form known as be ⟨ Б⟩ was developed to represent the Slavic languages' /b/. īy Byzantine times, the Greek letter ⟨ Β⟩ came to be pronounced /v/, so that it is known in modern Greek as víta (still written βήτα). The Hebrew letter bet ⟨ ב⟩ is a separate development of the Phoenician letter.

The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf ⟨ ⟩, but bēt (Phoenician for 'house') was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ⟨ ⟩ adapted from the separate hieroglyph Pr ⟨ ⟩ meaning 'house'. The Greek letter was an adaptation of the Phoenician letter bēt ⟨ 𐤁⟩. The Roman ⟨B⟩ derived from the Greek capital beta ⟨ Β⟩ via its Etruscan and Cumaean variants. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants. It represents the voiced bilabial stop in many languages, including English. Its name in English is bee (pronounced / ˈ b iː/), plural bees. B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin-script alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide.

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