N or n is the fourteenth letter of the modern English alphabet and the basic Latin ISO alphabet. Its English name is en (pronounced / ˈɛn /), plural ens.

One of the most common hieroglyphs, the snake, was used in Egyptian writing to mean a sound like the English ⟨J⟩ because the Egyptian word for “snake” was djet. Many speculate that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted the hieroglyphs to create the first alphabet and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N because their word for “snake” could have started with that sound. However, the name of the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means “fish” in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was / n / – as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and modern.

Use in writing systems

⟨N⟩ is an alveolar tooth or nose in almost all languages ​​that use the Latin alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet. A common digraph with ⟨n⟩ is ⟨ng⟩, which is a velar nose in variation languages, usually positioned at the end of the English language. Often, before the velar plosive (as in ink or jungle), the only ⟨n⟩ represents a velar nose. In Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ represents the palatal of the nose / ɲ /. The Portuguese and Vietnamese spellings for this sound are ⟨nh⟩, while Spanish, Breton and several other languages ​​use the letter ⟨ñ⟩.

In English, ⟨n⟩ is usually silent when preceded by ⟨m⟩ at the end of words, as in the hymn; however, it is pronounced in this combination when a word appears medially, as in the hymn.

On the other hand, other consonants are often silent when preceded by ⟨n⟩ at the beginning of an English word. Examples include gnome, knife, mnemonics, and pneumonia.

⟨n⟩ is the sixth most common letter and the second most commonly used consonant in English language (after ⟨t⟩).

Other uses

In mathematics, the italic form n is a very common symbol for a variable that is a natural number. The set of natural numbers is referred to as ℕ.

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