Be is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

. It commonly represents the voiced bilabial plosive

Voiced bilabial plosive

The voiced bilabial plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is b. The voiced bilabial plosive occurs in English, and it is the sound denoted by the...

 /b/, like the English pronunciation of ⟨b⟩ in "bee". It should not be confused with the Cyrillic letter Ve

Ve (Cyrillic)

Ve is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents the voiced labiodental fricative , like the pronunciation of ⟨v⟩ in "very"....

  (В в), which is shaped like Latin capital letter B but represents the voiced labiodental fricative

Voiced labiodental fricative

The voiced labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is v....

 /v/.

The Cyrillic letter Be is romanized using the Latin letter B.

History

Both the Cyrillic letters Be and Ve

VE

VE, Ve or ve may refer to:* Vili and Vé, gods in Norse mythology* Vé , a shrine in Germanic paganism and modern place name element* Ve , a character from the Cyrillic alphabet* Ve , a character of the Arabic alphabet...

 (В в) were derived from the Greek letter Beta

Beta (letter)

Beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative ....

 (Β β).

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet

Early Cyrillic alphabet

The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...

 the name of the letter Be was (buky), meaning "letters".

In the Cyrillic numeral system

Cyrillic numerals

The Cyrillic numerals are a numbering system derived from the Cyrillic script, used by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century when Peter the Great replaced it with Arabic numerals....

, the letter Be had no numeric value because the letter Ve inherited the Greek letter Beta's numeric value.

Form

The letter Be is similar in shape to the digit 6. In the Serbian/Macedonian alphabet, the lowercase letter Be has a different printed form as shown in the illustration which shows both the standard and variant form.
The cursive form of the lowercase letter Be may look like the lowercase Greek letter Delta

Delta (letter)

Delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 4. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Dalet...

 (δ).

Usage

In Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 and Bulgarian

Bulgarian language

Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...

, the letter Be generally represents the voiced bilabial plosive

Voiced bilabial plosive

The voiced bilabial plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is b. The voiced bilabial plosive occurs in English, and it is the sound denoted by the...

 /b/, but word-finally or before a voiceless consonant

Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...

 it also represents the voiceless [p], and before a palatalizing vowel it represents /bʲ/.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Β β : Greek letter Beta
  Beta (letter)
  Beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative ....
  
  
• В в : Cyrillic letter Ve
  Ve (Cyrillic)
  Ve is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents the voiced labiodental fricative , like the pronunciation of ⟨v⟩ in "very"....
  
  
• B b : Latin letter B
  B
  B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:...
  
  

Computing codes

character	Б		б
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BE		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER BE
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...	1041	0411	1073	0431
UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...	208 145	D0 91	208 177	D0 B1
Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...	Б	Б	б	б
KOI8-R KOI8-R KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters...  and KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,...	226	E2	194	C2
CP 855 Code page 855 Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:...	163	A3	162	A2
Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages...	193	C1	225	E1
ISO-8859-5	177	B1	209	D1
Mac Cyrillic MacCyrillic encoding The Macintosh Cyrillic encoding is used in Apple Macintosh computers to represent texts in the Cyrillic script.Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point and its decimal code point. Only the second half of the table is shown, the first half being the same as ASCII....	129	81	225	E1