B

B is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents the voiced stop /b/. Historically it is from Phoenician beth ('house') by way of Greek beta. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter B the digit 2; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

The Latin B's sound and its Phoenician root are covered elsewhere in this atlas; this entry follows its shape. Phoenician bet, meaning house, was drawn as a simple angular floor plan, little more than a vertical stroke with an open triangle. Greek beta straightened this into two stacked triangular lobes on a vertical stem, a form still visible in the modern capital Beta.

Etruscan and early Roman scribes rounded those triangles into the two bows familiar today, and by the time of classical Roman inscriptions the capital B had already reached essentially its current shape, with the lower bow customarily drawn slightly larger than the upper for visual balance, a convention type designers still follow. The lowercase b emerged later, through Roman cursive and then uncial handwriting, which extended the letter's left stroke upward into an ascender while keeping only the lower bow as a closed loop; that ascender-plus-bowl structure, fixed by the Carolingian minuscule of the 9th century, is the direct ancestor of the lowercase b in every printed and digital typeface used today.

Blackletter and Fraktur hands, used in German-language printing into the 20th century, gave the capital B a markedly more angular, broken-stroke form than the rounded shape common elsewhere in Europe, a divergence type historians treat as a separate branch of the letter's graphic family rather than as a competing origin.