Look up N, n in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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]

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

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).

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of N

NATO phonetic		Morse code
November		–·
Signal flag	Semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

Meanings of N

See N (disambiguation).

See also

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N

• Ñ