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T (named tee /ˈtiː/[1]) is the 20th letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.[2]
Contents
History
Phoenician Taw |
Etruscan T |
Greek Tau |
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Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic Taw, Greek alphabet Tαυ (Tau), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing [t] in each of these; and it has also kept its original basic shape in all of these alphabets.
Usage
In English, ⟨t⟩ often denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive (International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA: /t/), as in "tart", "tee", or "ties", often with aspiration at the beginnings of words or before stressed vowels.
The digraph ⟨ti⟩ often takes /ʃ/ (a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant) word-medially when followed by a vowel, as in nation, ratio, negotiation, and Croatia.
⟨t⟩ tends to indicate the affricate /t͡ʃ/ if it precedes ⟨ur⟩ plus a vowel, as in future.
A common digraph is th, which usually represents a dental fricative, but occasionally is a t with a silent h (as in Thomas and thyme.)
Other languages
In the International Phonetic Alphabet [t] denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive. In the orthographies of other languages, ⟨t⟩ is often used for /t/, the voiceless dental plosive /t̪/ or similar sounds.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Τ τ : Greek letter Tau
- Т т : Cyrillic letter Te
- ת : Hebrew letter Tav
Computing codes
Character | T | t | ||
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Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T | LATIN SMALL LETTER T | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
Unicode | 84 | U+0054 | 116 | U+0074 |
UTF-8 | 84 | 54 | 116 | 74 |
Numeric character reference | T | T | t | t |
EBCDIC family | 227 | E3 | 163 | A3 |
ASCII 1 | 84 | 54 | 116 | 74 |
- 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations
References
- ^ "T", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "tee", op. cit.
- ^ Lewand, Robert. "Relative Frequencies of Letters in General English Plain text". Cryptographical Mathematics. Central College. Retrieved 2008-06-25.
External links
Media related to T at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of T at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of t at Wiktionary
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