N

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Image:Latin alphabet Nn.svg
Basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd   Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv   Ww Xx Yy Zz

N is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled en (pronounced /ɛn/).^[1]

Contents 1 History of the form 2 Usage 3 Codes for computing 4 Meanings of N 5 See also

[edit] History of the form

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
<hiero>D</hiero>	Image:Proto-semiticN-01.png	Image:PhoenicianN-01.png	Image:EtruscanN-01.png	Image:Nu uc lc.svg

[edit] Usage

N serves as a dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with <n> is <ng>, which produces a velar nasal in a variety of languages, usually final in English. In languages like Italian and French, <gn> represents a palatal nasal (/ɲ/). The Portuguese spelling for this sound is <nh>. 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 International Phonetic Alphabet, 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).

[edit] Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital N is codepoint U+004E and the lowercase 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 "&#78;" and "&#110;" for upper and lower case respectively.

[edit] Meanings of N

See N (disambiguation).

[edit] See also

• Ñ

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter N with diacritics ŃńǸǹŇňÑñṄṅŅņṆṇṊṋṈṉᵰƝɲȠƞᶇɳȵN̈n̈ Two-letter combinations Na Nb Nc Nd Ne Nf Ng Nh Ni Nj Nk Nl Nm Nn No Np Nq Nr Ns Nt Nu Nv Nw Nx Ny Nz NA NB NC ND NE NF NG NH NI NJ NK NL NM NN NO NP NQ NR NS NT NU NV NW NX NY NZ Letter-digit & Digit-letter combinations                 N0 N1 N2 N3 N4 N5 N6 N7 N8 N9                 0N 1N 2N 3N 4N 5N 6N 7N 8N 9N history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters

als:N

ar:N arc:N ast:N az:N bs:N br:N (lizherenn) ca:N cs:N co:N da:N de:N el:N es:N eo:N eu:N fa:N fr:N (lettre) fur:N gd:N gl:N ko:N hr:N ilo:N id:N is:N it:N he:N ka:N kw:N sw:N ht:N la:N hu:N nl:N (letter) ja:N no:N nn:N uz:N (xarf) pl:N pt:N ro:N qu:N ru:N (латиница) simple:N sk:N sl:N sr:N (слово латинице) fi:N sv:N tl:N th:N vi:N tr:N uk:N (латиниця) yo:N zh-yue:N zh:N