This article is about the letter of the Latin alphabet. For the same
letterform in the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, see
Te (Cyrillic) and
Tau. For other uses, see
T (disambiguation).
T, or t, is the twentieth
letter of the
Latin alphabet, used in the
modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is
tee (pronounced /ˈtiː/), plural tees.[1]
Taw was the last letter of the Western
Semitic and
Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic Taw, the
Greek alphabet Tαυ (Tau),
Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing [
t] in each of these, and it has also kept its original basic shape in most of these alphabets.
A common
digraph is ⟨th⟩, which usually represents a
dental fricative, but occasionally represents /t/ (as in Thomas and thyme). The digraph ⟨ti⟩ often corresponds to the sound /ʃ/ (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.
ȶ : T with curl is used in Sino-Tibetanist linguistics[13]
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.[14]
𐍄 :
Gothic letter tius, which derives from Greek Tau
𐌕 :
Old Italic T, which derives from Greek Tau, and is the ancestor of modern Latin T
ᛏ :
Runic letter
teiwaz, which probably derives from old Italic 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.
^Unicode treats representation of letters of the
Latin alphabet written in
insular script as a typeface choice that needs no separate coding. U+A786ꞆLATIN CAPITAL LETTER INSULAR T and U+A787ꞇLATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR T are provided for use by phonetics specialists.[5]
^Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
References
^"T", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "tee", op. cit.