P is the sixteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled
pee or occasionally
pe ()
["P" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "pee," op. cit.].
History
The Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek ? or ? (Pi), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized , a voiceless bilabial plosive.
Usage
In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps 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 Ps (such as "in" + "pulse" ? "impulse" — see also List of Latin words with English derivatives).
A common digraph in English is "ph", which represents the voiceless labiodental fricative , and can be used to transliterate Phi (?) in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph "pf" is common, representing a labial affricate of .
Those who speak Arabic are usually unaccustomed to pronouncing ; they pronounce it as or instead.
Codes for computing
In Unicode, the capital "P" is codepoint U+0050 and the lowercase "p" is U+0070.
The ASCII code for capital "P" is 80 and for lowercase "p" is 112; or, in binary, 01010000 and 01110000, respectively.
The EBCDIC code for capital "P" is 215 and for lowercase "p" is 151.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "
P" and "
p" for upper and lower case, respectively.
See also
Latin letters
PPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPP PPPPP PPPPPPP PP
