B

In English and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, ‹b› denotes the voiced bilabial plosive (/b/), as in bib. In English it is sometimes silent; most instances are derived from old monosyllablic words with the b final and immediately preceded by an m, such as lamb and bomb; a few are examples of etymological spelling to make the word more like its Latin original, such as debt or doubt. In Estonian, Icelandic, and in Chinese, ‹b› doesn't denote a voiced consonant; instead, it represents a voiceless /p/ that contrasts with either a geminated /pp/ (in Estonian) or an aspirated /pʰ/ (in Chinese, Danish and Icelandic), represented by ‹p›. In Fijian ‹b› represents a prenasalized /mb/, whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it represents an implosive /ɓ/, in contrast to the digraph ‹bh› which represents /b/.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA, ‹b› denotes the voiced bilabial plosive. Variants of ‹b› denote related bilabial consonants, like the voiced bilabial implosive and the bilabial trill. In X-SAMPA, capital ‹B› denotes the voiced bilabial fricative.

In Contracted (grade 2) English braille, ‹b› stands for "but" when in isolation.

In Unicode the capital ‹B› is codepoint U+0042 and the lower case ‹b› is U+0062.

The EBCDIC code for capital ‹B› is 194 and for lowercase ‹b› is 130.

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