N

One of the most common snake hieroglyph was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English "J", because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet. It is speculated that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for "snake" may have begun with that sound. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was /n/—as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages.

N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with is , which represents a velar nasal in a variety of languages, usually positioned word-finally in English. In languages like Italian and French, represents a palatal nasal (/ɲ/). The Portuguese spelling for this sound is . In English, n is silent when it is preceded by an m, in words like hymn (although it is pronounced in words such as damnation).

N is the second-most commonly used consonant in the English language (after T).

In Unicode the capital N is codepoint U+004E and the lower case n is U+006E.

The EBCDIC code for capital N is 213 and for lowercase n is 149.

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

[ see less ]