B

Egyptian Pr	Phoenician  bēt	Greek beta	Etruscan B	Latin B	Runic beorc

Uncial B	Insular B	Blackletter B	Antiqua B	Modern Roman B

Old English was originally written in runes, whose equivalent letter was beorc ⟨ᛒ⟩, meaning "birch". 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 ⟨⟩.

The uncial ⟨⟩ and half-uncial ⟨⟩ introduced by the Gregorian and Irish missions gradually developed into the Insular scripts' ⟨⟩. These Old English Latin alphabets supplanted the earlier runes, whose use was fully banned under King Canute in the early 11th century. The Norman Conquest popularised the Carolingian half-uncial forms which latter developed into blackletter ⟨  ⟩. Around 1300, letter case was increasingly distinguished, with upper- and lower-case B taking separate meanings. 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. The present forms of the English cursive B were developed by the 17th century.

Late Renaissance or early Baroque design of a B, from 1627

The Roman ⟨B⟩ derived from the Greek capital beta ⟨Β⟩ via its Etruscan and Cumaean variants. The Greek letter was an adaptation of the Phoenician letter bēt ⟨𐤁⟩.[3] The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf ⟨  ⟩,[4] but bēt (Phoenician for "house") was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ⟨  ⟩ probably adapted from the separate hieroglyph Pr ⟨ ⟩ meaning "house".[5][6] The Hebrew letter beth ⟨ב⟩ is a separate development of the Phoenician letter.[3]

By Byzantine times, the Greek letter ⟨Β⟩ came to be pronounced /v/,[3] so that it is known in modern Greek as víta (still written βήτα). 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/.[3] (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.)

B is also a musical note. In English-speaking countries, it represents Si, the 12th note of a chromatic scale built on C. In Central Europe and Scandinavia, "B" is used to denote B-flat and the 12th note of the chromatic scale is denoted "H". Archaic forms of 'b', the b quadratum (square b, ♮) and b rotundum (round b, ♭) are used in musical notation as the symbols for natural and flat, respectively.

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

In computer science, B is the symbol for byte, a unit of information storage.

In engineering, B is the symbol for bel, a unit of level.

In chemistry, B is the symbol for boron, a chemical element.

The blood-type B emoji (🅱️) was added in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, and became a popular internet meme in 2018 where letters would be replaced with the emoji.[7]

¹ Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

• Media related to B at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of B at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of b at Wiktionary
• Giles, Peter (1911), "B" , Encyclopædia Britannica, 3 (11th ed.), p. 87