N

N
ISO basic Laitin alphabet

Cursive script 'n' and capital 'N' in the U.S. D'Nealian script style

N (named en /ˈɛn/^[1]) is the fowerteent letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History o the fairms

Ane o the maist common hieroglyphs, snake, wis uised in Egyptian writin tae staund for a soond lik the Inglish ⟨J⟩, acause the Egyptian wird for "snake" wis djet. It is speculatit bi mony that Semitic fowk wirkin in Egyp adaptit hieroglyphics tae creaut the first alphabet, an that thay uised the same snake seembol tae represent N, acause thair wird for "snake" mey hae begun wi that soond. Houiver, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Ebreu, Aramaic an Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some o thir leids. The soond value o the letter wis /n/—as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin an aw modren leids.

Egyptian hieroglyph
for J

Phoenician
Nun

Etruscan
N

Greek
Nu

Uisage

N represents a dental or alveolar nasal in virtually aw leids that uise the Latin alphabet, an in the Internaitional Phonetic Alphabet. A common digraph wi 'n' is 'ng', which represents a velar nasal in a variety o leids, uisually poseetioned wird-finally in Inglis. Eften, afore a velar plosive (as in ink or jungle), 'n' alane represents a velar nasal. In Italian an French, 'gn' represents a palatal nasal (/ɲ/). The Portuguese an Vietnamese spellin for this soond is 'nh', while Spainyie an a few ither leids uise the letter 'ñ'. In Inglis, 'n' is generally silent when it is precedit bi an 'm' at the end o wirds, as in hymn; houiver, 'n' is pronoonced in this combination when occurring wird medially, as in hymnal.

'n' is the saxt maist common letter an the seicont-maist commonly uised consonant in the Inglis leid (efter 't').

In mathematics, the italic form (n) is the common seembol for a variable quantity, especially ane which represents an integer. $\mathbb {N}$ is eften uised tae refer tae the set o natural nummers.

In statistics, the italic fairm (n) is uised tae denote the nummer o observations or replicates includit in a statistical sample.

In chemistry, N represents the element Nitrogen. In biochemistry, N is the ane-letter code seembol for the amino acid asparagine. It is an aa the seembol for the SI unit o force, the newton.

Relatit letters an ither similar characters

Ν ν : Greek letter Nu
П п (П п) : Cyrillic letter Pe
Н н (Н н) : Cyrillic letter En
И и (И и) : Cyrillic letter I
Ń ń : Latin letter N wi acute
Ñ ñ : Latin letter N wi tilde
Ň ň : Latin letter N wi caron

Computin codes

Character	N		n
Unicode name	LATIN CAIPITAL LETTER N		LATIN SMAA LETTER N
Encodins	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	78	U+004E	110	U+006E
UTF-8	78	4E	110	6E
Numeric chairacter reference	N	N	n	n
EBCDIC faimily	213	D5	149	95
ASCII ¹	78	4E	110	6E

¹ An aa for encodins based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodins.

Ither representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
November	–·

		[[File:Sign language {{{fingerspelling}}}.svg\|90px]]
Seegnal banner	Banner semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspellin)	Braille dots-1345

References

↑ "N" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "en," op. cit.

Freemit airtins

Media relatit tae N at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionar defineetion o N at Wiktionary
The dictionar defineetion o n at Wiktionary

The ISO basic Laitin alphabet v t e
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 N with diacritics
Ńń	Ǹǹ	Ňň	Ññ	Ṅṅ	Ņņ	Ṇṇ	Ṋṋ	Ṉṉ	N̈n̈	Ɲɲ	Ƞƞ	Ŋŋ	Ꞑꞑ	ᵰ	ᶇ	ɳ	ȵ
Related
Derivations Diacritics History ISO/IEC 646 Leet o letters Numerals Palaeography Punctuation Unicode

[1] "N" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "en," op. cit.

[1]