R

This article is about the letter R. For other uses, see R (disambiguation).

ISO basic Latin alphabet
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

R ( /ˈɑr/, Hiberno-English: /ˈɔr/^{[citation needed]}; named ar or or) is the eighteenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph tp	Phoenician resh	Etruscan R	Greek Rho	Later Etruscan R

The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for /r/ by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš (also the name of the letter). It developed into Greek Ρ ῥῶ (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.^{[citation needed]}

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, although it fell out of use around the 18th century.

Usage

See also: rhotic consonant, r-colored vowel, and guttural R

In science, the letter R is a symbol for the gas constant. Mathematicians use R or $\mathbb{R}$ (an R in blackboard bold, displayed as ℝ in Unicode) for set of all real numbers.

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 consonants; [r] represents the alveolar trill.

Alveolar trill [r]	Listen	some dialects of British English or in emphatic speech, standard Dutch, Finnish, Galician, German in some dialects, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Catalan, Portuguese (traditional form), Romanian, Scots, Spanish and Albanian 'rr', Swedish, Welsh
Alveolar approximant [ɹ]	Listen	English (most varieties), Dutch in some Dutch dialects (in specific positions of words), Swedish, Portuguese in some dialects (in specific positions of words), Faroese, Sicilian
Alveolar flap / Alveolar tap [ɾ]	Listen	Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Albanian 'r', Turkish, Dutch, Italian, Venetian, Galician, Leonese
Voiced retroflex fricative [ʐ]	Listen	Spanish used as an allophone of /r/ in some South American accents; Standard Chinese (in pinyin); Vietnamese (southern dialects)
Retroflex approximant [ɻ]	Listen	some varieties of American English; Standard Chinese (in pinyin); and Gutnish
Retroflex flap [ɽ]	Listen	sometimes in Scottish English
Uvular trill [ʀ]	Listen	German stage standard; some Dutch dialects (in Brabant and Limburg, and some city dialects in The Netherlands), Swedish in Southern Sweden, Norwegian in western and southern parts
Voiced uvular fricative [ʁ]	Listen	German, Danish, French, some European Portuguese 'rr'
Voiceless uvular fricative [χ]	Listen	some Brazilian Portuguese 'rr'
Voiceless glottal fricative [h]	Listen	some Brazilian Portuguese 'rr'

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, e.g. Kweyol for Kreyol.

Shape

The letter R is the only letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet in which the uppercase has a closed section and the lowercase does not.

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 to sound like a growling 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.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Ρ ρ/ϱ : Greek letter Rho
• Р р : Cyrillic letter Er
• Я я : Cyrillic letter Ya
• ℛ : Script capital R

Computing codes

character	R	r
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R	LATIN SMALL LETTER R
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	82	0052	114	0072
UTF-8	82	52	114	72
Numeric character reference	R	R	r	r
EBCDIC family	217	D9	153	99
ASCII 1	82	52	114	72

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Romeo	·–·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

See also

• Raidô
• Vocalic r
• Vox Canina

External links

• Media related to R at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for R
• The Wiktionary entry for r

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
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 R with diacritics
Ŕŕ	Řř	Ṙṙ	Ŗŗ	Ȑȑ	Ȓȓ	Ṛṛ	Ṝṝ	Ṟṟ	Ɍɍ	Ɽɽ	ᵲ	ᶉ	ɼ	ɾ	ᵳ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646