R is the eighteenth letter of the modern
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English () is spelled
ar, plural
ars; its name in
Hiberno-English is
or .
History
The original
Semitic letter was probably inspired by an
Egyptian hieroglyph for "head", pronounced
t-p in Egyptian, but it was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was
Rêš (also the name of the letter). It developed into Greek
Ρ (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.
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; 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.
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. 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.
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
