N

This article is about the letter. For other uses, see N (disambiguation).

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 ( /ˈɛn/; named en)^[1] is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.

History of the forms

One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, 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'	Phoenician N	Etruscan N	Greek Nu

Usage

Language

Dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with ⟨n⟩ is ⟨ng⟩, which represents a velar nasal in a variety of languages, usually positioned word-finally in English. Often, before a velar plosive (as in ink or jungle), ⟨n⟩ alone represents a velar nasal. In languages like Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ represents a palatal nasal (/ɲ/). The Portuguese spelling for this sound is ⟨nh⟩ (while Spanish and a few other languages use the letter ⟨ñ⟩). In English, ⟨n⟩ is generally silent when it is preceded by an ⟨m⟩ at the end of words, as in hymn; however, ⟨n⟩ is pronounced in this combination when occurring word medially, as in hymnal.

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

⟨n⟩ is the sixth most common letter and the second-most commonly used consonant in the English language (after ⟨t⟩).

Mathematics

In mathematics, the italic form (n) is the common symbol for a variable quantity, especially one which represents an integer.

$\mathbb{N}$ is often used to refer to the set of natural numbers.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Ν ν : Greek letter Nu
• П п (П п) : Cyrillic letter Pe
• Н н (Н н) : Cyrillic letter En
• И и (И и) : Cyrillic letter I
• Ń ń : Latin letter N with acute
• Ñ ñ : Latin letter N with tilde
• Ň ň : Latin letter N with caron

Computing codes

character	N		n
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N		LATIN SMALL LETTER N
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	78	004E	110	006E
UTF-8	78	4E	110	6E
Numeric character reference	N	N	n	n
EBCDIC family	213	D5	149	95
ASCII 1	78	4E	110	6E

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
November	–·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

References

1. ^ "N" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "en," op. cit.

External links

• Media related to N at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary definition of N
• The Wiktionary definition of n

The ISO basic Latin alphabetv · d · e
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
Ńń	Ǹǹ	Ňň	Ññ	Ṅṅ	Ņņ	Ṇṇ	Ṋṋ	Ṉṉ	N̈n̈	Ɲɲ	Ƞƞ	Ŋŋ	Ꞑꞑ	ᵰ	ᶇ	ɳ	ȵ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646