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N

Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia - Cite This Source

N, 14th letter of the alphabet. It is a usual symbol for a voiced alveolar (or dental) nasal, as in the English not. The diagraph ng represents a different sound, a voiced velar nasal, as in the English sing. The corresponding Greek letter is nu. In chemistry N is the symbol for the element nitrogen.

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N

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

N is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled en ().

History of the forms

The most common snake hieroglyphic was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English 'J', because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet. It is speculated that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for "snake" may have begun with that sound. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was /n/ - as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages.

Egyptian hieroglyph for 'J' Proto-Semitic N Phoenician N Etruscan N Greek Nu
D

Usage

N serves as a dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with is , which produces a velar nasal in a variety of languages, usually final in English. In languages like Italian and French, represents a palatal nasal (/ɲ/). The Portuguese spelling for this sound is . In English, n is silent when it is preceded by an m, in words like hymn (although it is pronounced in words such as damnation).

In the IPA, the lowercase [n] represents the alveolar nasal sound. A small capital [ɴ] represents the uvular nasal.

N is the second-most commonly used consonant in the English language (after T).

Codes for Computing

In Unicode the capital N is codepoint U+004E and the lower case n is U+006E.

The ASCII code for capital N is 78 and for lowercase n is 110; or in binary 01001110 and 01101110, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital N is 213 and for lowercase n is 149.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "N" and "n" for upper and lower case respectively.

Meanings of N

See also

als:N ar:N arc:N ast:N az:N bs:N ca:N cs:N co:N da:N de:N el:N es:N eo:N eu:N fa:N fur:N gd:N gl:N ko:N hr:N ilo:N is:N it:N he:N ka:N kw:N sw:N ht:N la:N lv:N lt:N hu:N ja:N no:N nn:N pl:N pt:N ro:N qu:N simple:N sk:N sl:N fi:N sv:N tl:N th:N vi:N tr:N yo:N zh-yue:N zh:N

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Last updated on Tuesday March 11, 2008 at 11:09:29 PDT (GMT -0700)
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