Look up R or r 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

R is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈɑr/) is spelled ar, plural ars;^[1] its name in Hiberno-English is or /ˈɔr/.

[edit] History

Egyptian hieroglyph tp	Proto-Semitic R	Phoenician resh	Etruscan R	Greek Rho	Later Etruscan R

The original Semitic letter was probably inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for "head", pronounced t-p in Egyptian, but it was used for /r/ by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was Rêš (also the name of the letter). It developed into Greek Ρ ῥῶ (Rhô) and Latin R. It is likely that some Etruscan and Western Greek forms of the letter added the extra stroke to distinguish it from a later form of the letter P.

The minuscule (lower-case) form of r developed through several variations on the capital form. In handwriting it was common not to close the bottom of the loop but continue into the leg, saving an extra pen stroke. The loop-leg stroke shortened into the simple arc used today. Another minuscule, r rotunda (ꝛ), kept the loop-leg stroke but dropped the vertical stroke. It fell out of use around the 18th century.

[edit] Usage

The letter R represents a rhotic consonant in many languages, as shown in the table below. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses several variations of the letter to represent the different rhotic consonsants; [r] represents the alveolar trill.

Other languages may use the letter r in their alphabets (or Latin transliterations schemes) to represent rhotic consonants different from the alveolar trill. In Haitian Creole, it represents a sound so weak that it is often written interchangeably with w, eg. Kweyol for Kreyol.

[edit] Dog's Letter

The letter R is sometimes referred to as the littera canina (canine letter). This phrase has Latin origins: the Latin R was trilled so it sounds like a snarling dog. A good example of a trilling R is the Spanish word for dog, perro. ^[2] In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, such a reference is made by Juliet's nurse in Act 2, scene 4, when she calls the letter R "the dog's name." The reference is also found in Ben Jonson's English Grammar.^[3]

[edit] Codes for computing

Alternative representations of R

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Romeo	·–·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

In Unicode, the capital R is codepoint U+0052 and the lower case r is U+0072.

The ASCII code for capital R is 82 and for lowercase r is 114; or in binary 01010010 and 01110010, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital R is 217 and for lowercase r is 153.

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

[edit] See also

Р, р - Er (Cyrillic) Ρ, ρ or ϱ - Rho (Greek) Я, я - (Cyrillic Ya)

Raidô Vocalic r Vox Canina

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: R

[edit] References