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The letter B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is bee .
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History
The letter B probably started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-semitic alphabet.
By 1500 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the basetter)|beth]].
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Typography
The modern lowercase letter b derives from later Roman times, when scribes began omitting the upper loop of the capital.
The letter B should not be confused with the visually similar German ß.
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Usage
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 Estonian, Icelandic, and in Chinese transcription, B is not voiced, but is still contrasted to P, which is geminated in Estonian and aspirated 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.
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Codes for computing
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
"&" and "&" for upper and lower case
respectively.
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Meanings for B
B stands for a bluish-white class of stars in the Morgan-Keenan system
B stands for a January 16 through 31 discovery, in the provisional designation of a comet (for example, C/1865 B1, the Great Southern Comet of 1865) or asteroid (for example, (4156) 1988 BE).
In aviation, B (followed by a -) is the ICAO prefix for civil aircraft registered in China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.
In chess, B is a notation symbol (descriptive style) for the bishop piece.
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 a security division ("Mandatory Protection") in the TCSEC.
A b-tree is a binary tree, a type of indexed data structure.
In education, B is a "good" grade, two below the top grade of A and one below A's former A-. The grade B can also, like A be split into three categories, B+ ,B and B- respectively in order of score
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.
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.
B represents the base of a geometric figure.
B was sometimes used in the early twentieth century as a prefix for "billion" (for example, BeV).
b was the symbol for the barn, a unit of effective cross-section in particle physics.
B, or "B-side", is the second or reverse side of a vinyl record; also called the flip side.
The bottom quark is represented with small "b", the B meson is represented with capital "B".
the NATO B band ranges from 0.25 to 0.50 GHz.
B is also seen as the unlucky letter of alphabet, as it looks like a scratched together 13.
B is a famous flash movie by Strawbery Clock
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See also
sn:B
yo:B
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