General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20265 min read

N

N (lowercase n) is the fourteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet¹ and, in English and many other languages, represents the voiced alveolar nasal sound². In Unicode it is encoded as U+004E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N in the Basic Latin block, with the lowercase n at U+006E³. Derived letters with diacritics extend it across European and African orthographies, from Polish Ń and Spanish Ñ to the velar nasal eng (ŋ) used in Sami, Mende, and the International Phonetic Alphabet⁴^•⁵.

Key fact	Detail
Alphabet position	Fourteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet¹
Unicode encoding	U+004E (uppercase), U+006E (lowercase); UTF-8 bytes 4E and 6E, one byte each³
Earliest name	Nūn in Semitic, whence the Greek name ny (νῦ)⁶
Pictographic origin	Phoenician nun, meaning fish; the Egyptian hieroglyph for the n sound was a wavy line representing water⁷
Roman adoption	N was among the thirteen letters the Romans accepted unchanged from the Greek alphabet⁸
Pronunciation range	The n sound may be dental, alveolar, palatal, or guttural depending on where the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth; English n is alveolar⁶
Derived letters	Ń (Polish), Ñ (Spanish, Basque, Galician), Ņ (Latvian), Ň (Czech and Slovak), Ŋ (Sami, Mende, IPA)⁴^•⁵

Origin and early history

The letter traces back through the Phoenician alphabet to a pictogram. The Phoenician sign was called nun, pronounced roughly "noon," and meant fish; it was used more than three thousand years ago⁷. Before the Phoenicians, the Egyptian hieroglyph for the n sound was a wavy line representing water⁷. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica records that the earliest name of the symbol was Nūn, from which the Greek name ny (νῦ) derives⁶.

Around the 10th century B.C. the Greeks began adopting parts of the Phoenician alphabet. They took over the shape of the Phoenician nun and preserved its name in modified form as "nu," and the sign continued to represent the n sound⁷. When the Romans adopted and modified the Greek alphabet, N was one of thirteen letters accepted in an unchanged form, alongside A, B, E, H, I, K, M, O, T, X, Y, and Z⁸.

The graphic history of the letter is comparatively uneventful. In its early forms the first limb was longer than the others, as was also true of M; the Semitic languages gradually diminished the size of the other two limbs, while the Greek and Latin alphabets tended to make all three of equal length⁶.

Sound

The sound of n varies according to the point at which the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth: it may be dental, alveolar, palatal, or guttural. Sanskrit distinguishes these four sounds with different symbols. The French and German n standing alone is dental, while the English n is alveolar, pronounced against the sockets of the teeth rather than the teeth themselves. The guttural nasal is written in English as ng as in ring, and the palatal n as in lynch has no separate symbol in English⁶.

Derived letters in Unicode

Because Latin-script languages needed to record nasal and palatal sounds absent from classical Latin, many modified forms of N were created, and Unicode encodes them across several blocks⁹.

Ñ (U+00D1, N with tilde) is used in Basque, Galician, and Spanish⁴.
Ń/ń (U+0143/U+0144, N with acute) is used in Polish⁴.
Ņ/ņ (U+0145/U+0146, N with cedilla) is used in Latvian; despite their names, this pair of characters should normally be displayed with a comma below⁵.
Ň/ň (U+0147/U+0148, N with caron) is decomposable as N plus the combining caron U+030C⁵.
Ŋ/ŋ (U+014A/U+014B, eng, also called engma or angma) is used in Sami, Mende, and the IPA, and represents the velar nasal and nasalization⁵.
Ɲ (U+019D, N with left hook) is an African-language letter whose lowercase is ɲ¹⁰.
ǹ (U+01F9, N with grave) is used in Pinyin¹⁰.

One derived character has been retired. ŉ (U+0149, LATIN SMALL LETTER N PRECEDED BY APOSTROPHE) was an Afrikaans legacy compatibility character for ISO/IEC 6937, added in Unicode 1.0; it is deprecated and its use is strongly discouraged, with the uppercase form given as the sequence ʼ (U+02BC) followed by N⁵.

Encoding

The uppercase N occupies code point 78 (decimal) in ASCII, Latin-1, Windows-1252, and other single-byte legacy encodings, and its UTF-8 byte sequence is the single byte 4E³. In UTF-16 it is 4E 00 (little-endian) or 00 4E (big-endian), and in UTF-32 it takes four bytes³. The EU Publications Office lists N and n among the letters used in all of the official languages it tabulates, from Basque and Catalan through Polish, Spanish, and Turkish⁴.

Other uses

In mathematics, a bold or double-struck N (ℕ) denotes the set of natural numbers, a use derived from N being the first letter of the word "natural"¹¹. In grammar, the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française lists "n." as an abbreviation for nom (noun)¹¹.

The letter's own name has a history of its own. Latin called each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, and the names of the continuant consonants, including N, appear to have undergone changes through history and to be clear only toward the end of antiquity, from the fourth century A.D. on¹².

References

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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