# P

P, or p, is the sixteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is pee (pronounced /ˈpiː/ ), plural pees.

## History

The Semitic Pê (mouth), as well as the Greek Π or π (Pi), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet all symbolized /p/, a voiceless bilabial plosive.
| Egyptian | Proto-Sinaitic | Proto-Canaanite pʿit | Phoenician Pe | Western Greek Pi | Etruscan P | Latin P |

## Use in writing systems

Pronunciation of ⟨p⟩ by language :
| Orthography | Phonemes |
| Standard Chinese (Pinyin) | /pʰ/ |
| English | /p/, silent |
| French | /p/, silent |
| German | /p/ |
| Portuguese | /p/ |
| Spanish | /p/ |
| Turkish | /p/ |

### English

In English orthography, ⟨p⟩ represents the sound /p/.
A common digraph in English is ⟨ph⟩, which represents the sound /f/, and can be used to transliterate ⟨φ⟩ phi in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph ⟨pf⟩ is common, representing a labial affricate /pf/.
Most English words beginning with ⟨p⟩ are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin and Greek; these languages preserve the Proto-Indo-European initial *p. Native English cognates of such words often start with ⟨f⟩, since English is a Germanic language and thus has undergone Grimm's law; a native English word with an initial /p/ would reflect Proto-Indo-European initial *b, which is so rare that its existence as a phoneme is disputed. However, native English words with non-initial ⟨p⟩ are quite common; such words can come from either Kluge's law or the consonant cluster /sp/ (PIE: *p has been preserved after s).
P is the eighth least frequently used letter in the English language.

### Other languages

In most European languages, ⟨p⟩ represents the sound /p/.

### Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨p⟩ is used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive.

## Other uses

* A bold italic letter p is used in musical notation as a dynamic indicator for "quiet". It stands for the Italian word piano.

## Related characters
### Ancestors, descendants and siblings

The Latin letter P represents the same sound as the Greek letter Pi, but it looks like the Greek letter Rho.
* 𐤐 : Semitic letter Pe, from which the following symbols originally derive:
** Π π : Greek letter Pi
*** 𐌐 : Old Italic and Old Latin P, which derives from Greek Pi, and is the ancestor of modern Latin P. The Roman P had this form (𐌐) on coins and inscriptions until the reign of Claudius, c. 50 AD.
*** 𐍀 : Gothic letter pertra/pairþa, which derives from Greek Pi
*** П п : Cyrillic letter Pe, which derives from Greek Pi
** Ⲡ ⲡ : Coptic letter Pi
** Պ պ: Armenian letter Pe
* P with diacritics: Ṕ ṕ Ṗ ṗ Ᵽ ᵽ Ƥ ƥ ᵱ ᶈ
* Turned P
* Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to P:
** U+1D18 ᴘ LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL P
** U+1D3E ᴾ MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL P
** U+1D56 ᵖ MODIFIER LETTER SMALL P
* $_p$ : Subscript small p was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902

### Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols

* ₱ : Philippine peso sign
* 𝒫, 𝓅 : script letter P (uppercase and lowercase, respectively), used in mathematics. (In other contexts, a script typeface (or computer font) should be used.)
* ℘ Weierstrass p
* ℗ : sound recording copyright symbol
* ♇ : Pluto symbol
* ꟼ : Reversed P was used in ancient Roman texts to stand for puella (girl)
* Ꝑ ꝑ, Ꝓ ꝓ, Ꝕ, ꝕ : Various forms of P were used for medieval scribal abbreviations

## Other representations
### Computing

Character information :
| Preview | P | P | p | p | Ｐ | Ｐ | ｐ | ｐ |
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P | LATIN SMALL LETTER P | LATIN SMALL LETTER P | FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P | FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER P | FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER P | FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER P |
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 80 | U+0050 | 112 | U+0070 | 65328 | U+FF30 | 65360 | U+FF50 |
| UTF-8 | 80 | 50 | 112 | 70 | 239 188 176 | EF BC B0 | 239 189 144 | EF BD 90 |
| Numeric character reference | &#80; | &#x50; | &#112; | &#x70; | &#65328; | &#xFF30; | &#65360; | &#xFF50; |
| EBCDIC family | 215 | D7 | 151 | 97 | | | | |
| ASCII | 80 | 50 | 112 | 70 | | | | |
* ↑ Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

### Other

| NATO phonetic | Morse code |
| Papa | ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ |
| Signal flag | Flag semaphore | American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling) | British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling) | Unified English Braille |