B

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See also Appendix:Variations of "b"

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[ Translingual

The letter B

Other representations of B

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Bravo		–···

Signal flag	Semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

[ Etymology 1

From Ancient Greek letter Β (B), “‘Beta’”).

[ Letter

B (upper case, lower case b)

The second letter of the classical Latin alphabet and most variations thereof, including the English alphabet.

[ Usage notes

The letter B (usually its lower case form b) is used in several romanization systems of non-Latin scripts to represent the bilabial plosive or stop, usually voiced (IPA: /b/).

[ See also

(select forms with diacritics) Ḃ Ḅ Ḇ Ƀ Ɓ Ƃ
(other scripts) Β (B, “‘Beta’”), Б (B, “‘Be’”), В (V, “‘Ve’”), ב (b, “‘beth’”), ㅂ (b, “‘bieup’”), ㄅ (b, “‘bāo’”)
For more variations, see Appendix:Variations of "b".
Appendix:Roman script

[ Etymology 2

(blood type): from antigen B
(symbol for boron): abbreviation of boron
(hexadecimal 11): The eleventh item from the sequence {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F}

[ Symbol

A blood type that has a specific antigen that aggravates the immune response in people with type A antigen in their blood. They can receive blood from type B or type O, but cannot receive blood from AB or A.
(chemistry) The symbol for boron.
(computing) Hexadecimal symbol for 11.
(biochemistry) IUPAC 1-letter abbreviation for either glutamine or glutamic acid

[ English

[ Pronunciation

(phoneme) IPA: /b/, SAMPA: /b/
(letter name) IPA: /biː/, SAMPA: /bi:/
Audio (UK)^{help, file}

Rhymes: -iː

[ Etymology 1

Old English letter B, from 7th century replacement by Latin B of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc letter ᛒ (B), “‘beorc’”).

[ Letter

B (upper case, lower case b, plural Bs)

The letter Bee, the second letter of the English alphabet.

[ Usage notes

In Modern English, the letter B is sometimes silent, e.g. in climb, and debt.

Apostrophes are sometimes used to form plurals of single upper case letters, especially at the start of a sentence:

A’s are difficult to achieve in this class.

Usually, though, the apostrophe is avoided when there is no risk of confusion:

She gets straight As in school.

[ See also

Previous letter: A
Next letter: C

[ Etymology 2

(cricket, balls): abbreviation of balls
(billion): abbreviation of billion

[ Abbreviation

(cricket) the number of balls faced by a batsman
The quantity one billion (1,000,000,000), usually used to signify a sum of money

$2.8 B — “two point eight billion dollars” (i.e., $2,800,000,000)

[ Etymology 3

(personality type): from contrast with the letter ‘A’ and its corresponding personality type
(academic grade): from the position of the letter ‘B’ in the English alphabet

[ Noun

Singular
B

Plural
Bs

B (plural Bs)

A personality type of someone who is relaxed and easygoing and able to engage in leisure activities without worrying about work.
An academic grade, better than a C and worse than an A
Signifies a second-tier or second class of a given commodity, group, or category, as in B-movie, B-list, etc.

The television studio revived some of it's B characters for the spinoff.