R

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 ( /ˈɑr/, Hiberno-English: /ˈɔr/; named ar or or)^[1] is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents 1 History 2 Usage 2.1 Dog's Letter 3 Codes for computing 4 See also 5 References

History

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

The original Semitic letter was probably inspired 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, although it fell out of use around the 18th century.

Usage

In science, the letter R is a symbol for the gas constant.

It 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.

Alveolar trill [r]	Listen	some dialects of British English or in emphatic speech, Finnish, German in some dialects, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Catalan, Portuguese (traditional European form), Romanian, Scots, Spanish and Albanian 'rr', Swedish, Welsh, in standard Dutch, Galician
Alveolar approximant [ɹ]	Listen	English (most varieties), Dutch in some Dutch dialects (in specific positions of words), Sicilian, Faroese
Alveolar flap / Alveolar tap [ɾ]	Listen	Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Albanian 'r', Turkish, Italian, Venetian, Galician, Leonese
Voiced retroflex fricative [ʐ]	Listen	Spanish used as an allophone of [r] in some South American accents.
Retroflex approximant [ɻ]	Listen	some varieties of American English
Retroflex flap [ɽ]	Listen	sometimes Scottish English
Uvular trill [ʀ]	Listen	German stage standard; some Dutch dialects (mainly in Belgium), Swedish in Southern Sweden, Norwegian in western and southern parts
Voiced uvular fricative [ʁ]	Listen	German, Danish, French, European Portuguese 'rr'
Voiceless uvular fricative [χ]	Listen	Brazilian Portuguese 'rr'
Voiceless glottal fricative [h]	Listen	some Brazilian Portuguese 'rr'

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, e.g. Kweyol for Kreyol.

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 to sound like a growling 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]

Codes for computing

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.

See also

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

Raidô Vocalic r Vox Canina

References

The Letter "R" General The letter R · Rhotic consonants (R-like sounds) · Rhotic and non-rhotic accents · R-colored vowels · Guttural R · Linking and intrusive R Pronunciations Alveolar trill [r] · Alveolar approximant [ɹ] · Alveolar tap [ɾ] · Alveolar lateral flap [ɺ] · Retroflex approximant [ɻ] · Retroflex flap [ɽ] · Uvular trill [ʀ] · Voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] · Labialized [ʋ] Variations ꝛ (R rotunda) · Ɍɍ · Ʀʀ · Ȑȑ · Ŕŕ · Ŗŗ · Řř · Ȓȓ · Ṙṙ · Ṛṛ · Ṝṝ · Ṟṟ · Rd · Rh · Rl · Rn · Rr · Rt · Rnd · ᚱ (Raidô) · ℛ (Riemann integral) · ℜ (Real part) · ℝ (Real number) · ® (Registered trademark symbol) · Ⓡ (Enclosed R)

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 R with diacritics ŔŕŘřṘṙŖŗȐȑȒȓṚṛṜṝṞṟɌɍⱤɽᵲᶉɼɾᵳ history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646