B

B is the second letter of the Latin alphabet, written in uppercase as B and lowercase as b. It descends, through the Greek letter beta, from the second sign of the Phoenician alphabet, and it is encoded in Unicode as U+0042 in the Basic Latin block.

Deep ancestry: from picture to letter

The alphabet that gave B to Europe began among Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt. Experts interviewed by Live Science identify the oldest confirmed alphabet as probably the proto-Sinaitic script, invented about 4,000 years ago by Canaanite workers at an Egyptian turquoise mine in the Sinai region. Out of the proto-Sinaitic script came the Phoenician alphabet, and that alphabet then gave rise to the early Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writing systems⁵.

The script borrowed a principle but invented its own idea. According to Philippa Steele, a philologist at the University of Cambridge, the proto-Sinaitic script seems to have been influenced by ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but the general principle of writing may have come from hieroglyphs while the concept of an alphabet and the values of the letters themselves were new ideas⁵.

Letter names in this family are real words. The names of the Phoenician letters, known especially from later Hebrew sources, correspond to common nouns; for example, the Hebrew letter name 'ayin is the same word as the Hebrew word for "eye." Because of this correspondence, some scholars suggested that the letters were originally pictographic signs, but there was no consensus on how or where such pictographic signs might have been invented¹.

The Phoenician alphabet and its spread

Before the Phoenician invention of the alphabet, the main writing systems of the Middle East were cuneiform, whose name comes from the Latin cuneus, wedge, and hieroglyphs, from the Greek hieros and glyphos⁶. The Phoenician alphabet was easy to learn by comparison, which made it particularly useful for trade between Mediterranean countries⁷.

Because the script could easily be used to record any language, it was adapted in the course of the first millennium BC for Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Phrygian, Lydian, Etruscan, and Latin, among other languages⁸. A full-size replica of a sarcophagus from Byblos dated to about 1000 BC bears the oldest text in Semitic alphabet script that we are able to understand; this early Semitic alphabet can be described as Proto-(pre)Phoenician⁹.

From Greek beta to the Latin letter

The transmission path of B is recorded in the letter names themselves. The names of the first two signs, Hebrew 'ālep and bêt and Greek alpha and beta, form the basis of the modern word "alphabet" (Greek alphabētos, Latin alphabetum), and the letters were transmitted, with the rest of the alphabet, from the Phoenicians to the Greeks and Etruscans, and then to the Romans¹. The Greeks were conscious of this debt and referred to their letters as phoïnikeia grammata, Phoenician letters¹.

The Greeks adopted the short Phoenician alphabet in the eighth century BCE and modified it by adding two or more consonant symbols¹⁰. The Greek alphabet must have reached the Aegean by the earlier 8th century BC, before the earliest known Greek examples of about 760 BC¹¹. When the Romans adopted the Greek alphabet along with other aspects of Greek culture, they continued its development, and the Roman alphabet used to write Latin was subsequently used by the languages of western Europe¹⁰.

B in Unicode and related scripts

In the Unicode Standard, B is U+0042 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B, an uppercase letter of the Latin script in the Basic Latin block, encoded since Unicode 1.1.0 in June 1993; its UTF-8 encoding is the single byte 0x42, and its lowercase counterpart is U+0062³.

Lookalike letters across scripts. Even though some letters like Latin "B" and Cyrillic "В" (and Greek "Β") may look the same, their lowercase equivalents are "b" and "в" (or "β") and thus do not look the same. The Unicode Standard has long maintained the principle that characters whose case mappings differ should be encoded separately, keeping case mappings as unambiguous as possible.⁴ The Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts are separately encoded for this and related reasons, including collation and script identity¹².

Extended forms of B. The Latin Extended-B block contains variants of the letter used for additional languages and phonetic notation¹³. These include U+0180 ƀ LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH STROKE, used in Americanist and Indo-Europeanist notation for a phonetic beta and also found in Old Saxon manuscripts, with uppercase U+0243 Ƀ; U+0181 Ɓ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B WITH HOOK, used in African languages; and U+0182 Ƃ and U+0183 ƃ, B with topbar, used in the old Zhuang orthography and former Soviet minority language scripts¹⁴.

References

1. Alphabet Origins: From Kipling to Sinai, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
2. The History of the Alphabet (lecture slides), Utah State University
3. Unicode Character 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B' (U+0042), fileformat.info
4. FAQ: Latin and Cyrillic Scripts, Unicode Consortium
5. What was the first alphabet in the world?, Live Science
6. The Phoenician Alphabet (lecture), Toula Museum
7. The Spread of the Phoenician Alphabet, AlephBet Foundation / LAU Alphabet Museum
8. Tyre and the other Phoenician city-states, Assyrian Empire Builders, University College London
9. The Gutenberg Museum Mainz (museum guide)
10. Ancient Greece: an Illustrated History
11. Alphabet, Greek, Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford Academic
12. UTN #26: On the Encoding of Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Han, Unicode Consortium
13. Chapter 7, The Unicode Standard, Version 18.0.0
14. Latin Extended-B nameslist, Unicode 18.0.0

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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