T

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see T (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with ㅜ.

Writing cursive forms of T

T (named tee /ˈtiː/) is the 20th letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in English language texts.

History

Phoenician Taw	Etruscan T	Greek Tau

Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic Taw, 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 all of these alphabets.

Use in writing systems

English

In English, ⟨t⟩ usually denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive (International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA: /t/), as in tart, tee, or ties, often with aspiration at the beginnings of words or before stressed vowels.

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.

The letter ⟨t⟩ corresponds to the affricate /t͡ʃ/ in some words as a result of yod-coalescence (for example, in words ending in "-ture", such as future).

A common digraph is ⟨th⟩, which usually represents a dental fricative, but occasionally represents /t/ (as in Thomas and thyme.)

Other languages

In the orthographies of other languages, ⟨t⟩ is often used for /t/, the voiceless dental plosive /t̪/ or similar sounds.

Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨t⟩ denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

• 𐤕 : Semitic letter Taw, from which the following symbols originally derive
• Τ τ : Greek letter Tau, from which T derives
• Т т : Cyrillic letter Te, also derived from Tau
• T with diacritics: Ť ť Ṫ ṫ Ţ ţ Ṭ ṭ Ʈ ʈ Ț ț Ṱ ṱ Ṯ ṯ Ƭ ƭ

Ligatures and abbreviations

• ™ : Trademark symbol
• ₮ : Mongolian tögrög
• ₸ : Kazakhstani tenge

Computing codes

Character	T		t
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T		LATIN SMALL LETTER T
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	84	U+0054	116	U+0074
UTF-8	84	54	116	74
Numeric character reference	T	T	t	t
EBCDIC family	227	E3	163	A3
ASCII 1	84	54	116	74

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

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Tango	–

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille dots-2345

External links

• Media related to T at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of T at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of t at Wiktionary