T, or t, is the twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is tee (pronounced ), plural tees.["T", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "tee", op. cit.]
It is derived from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 of the Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic alphabet and Hebrew alphabet Taw ת/𐡕/, Syriac alphabet Taw ܬ, and Arabic script ت Tāʼ) via the Greek letter tau (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second-most commonly used letter in English-language texts.
History
Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and
. The sound value of Semitic
Taw, the
Greek alphabet Tαυ (
Tau), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing in each of these, and it has also kept its original basic shape in most of these alphabets.
Use in writing systems
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English
In English, usually denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive (
International Phonetic Alphabet: ), as in
tart,
tee, or
ties, often with aspiration at the beginnings of words or before stressed vowels. The letter corresponds to the affricate in some words as a result of yod-coalescence (for example, in words ending in -"ture", such as
future).
A common digraph is , which usually represents a dental fricative, but occasionally represents (as in Thomas and thyme). The digraph often corresponds to the sound (a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant) word-medially when followed by a vowel, as in nation, ratio, negotiation, and Croatia.
In a few words of modern French origin, the letter T is silent at the end of a word; these include croquet and debut.
Other languages
In the
orthographies of other languages, is often used for , the voiceless dental plosive , or similar sounds.
Other systems
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive.
Other uses
Related characters
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
-
T with :
-
Ꞇ ꞇ : Insular script T, also used by William Pryce to designate the voiceless dental fricative θ
-
ᫎ : Combining small insular t was used in the Ormulum
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: Turned small t is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
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𐞯 : Modifier letter small t with retroflex hook is a superscript IPA letter
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𝼉 : Latin small letter t with hook and retroflex hook is a symbol for a voiceless retroflex implosive
-
𝼍 : Latin small turned t with curl is a click letter
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Uralic Phonetic Alphabet-specific symbols related to T:
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: Subscript small t was used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet prior to its formal standardization in 1902
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ȶ : T with curl is used in Sino-Tibetanist linguistics
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Ʇ ʇ : Turned capital T and turned small t were used in transcriptions of the Dakota language in publications of the American Board of Ethnology in the late 19th century.
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𝼪 : Small t with mid-height left hook was used by the British and Foreign Bible Society in the early 20th century for romanization of the Malayalam language.
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets
-
𐤕 : Semitic letter Taw, from which the following symbols originally derive:
-
Τ τ : Greek alphabet letter Tau
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: Coptic alphabet letter Taw, which derives from Greek Tau
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Т т : Cyrillic letter Te, also derived from Tau
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: Gothic alphabet letter tius, which derives from Greek Tau
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𐌕 : Old Italic T, which derives from Greek Tau, and is the ancestor of modern Latin T
-
ፐ : One of the 26 consonantal letters of the Ge'ez script. The Ge'ez abugida developed under the influence of Christian scripture by adding obligatory vocalic diacritics to the consonantal letters. Pesa ፐ is based on Tawe ተ.
Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations
Other representations
Computing
Unicode:
005416 (8410) and x007416 (11610) were used for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other
Notes
External links
