N

Ane o the maist common hieroglyphs, snake, wis uised in Egyptian writin tae staund for a soond lik the Inglish ⟨J⟩, acause the Egyptian wird for "snake" wis djet. It is speculatit bi mony that Semitic fowk wirkin in Egyp adaptit hieroglyphics tae creaut the first alphabet, an that thay uised the same snake seembol tae represent N, acause thair wird for "snake" mey hae begun wi that soond. Houiver, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Ebreu, Aramaic an Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some o thir leids. The soond value o the letter wis /n/—as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin an aw modren leids.

Egyptian hieroglyph for J	Phoenician Nun	Etruscan N	Greek Nu

N represents a dental or alveolar nasal in virtually aw leids that uise the Latin alphabet, an in the Internaitional Phonetic Alphabet. A common digraph wi 'n' is 'ng', which represents a velar nasal in a variety o leids, uisually poseetioned wird-finally in Inglis. Eften, afore a velar plosive (as in ink or jungle), 'n' alane represents a velar nasal. In Italian an French, 'gn' represents a palatal nasal (/ɲ/). The Portuguese an Vietnamese spellin for this soond is 'nh', while Spainyie an a few ither leids uise the letter 'ñ'. In Inglis, 'n' is generally silent when it is precedit bi an 'm' at the end o wirds, as in hymn; houiver, 'n' is pronoonced in this combination when occurring wird medially, as in hymnal.

'n' is the saxt maist common letter an the seicont-maist commonly uised consonant in the Inglis leid (efter 't').

In mathematics, the italic form (n) is the common seembol for a variable quantity, especially ane which represents an integer. ${\displaystyle \mathbb {N} }$ is eften uised tae refer tae the set o natural nummers.

In statistics, the italic fairm (n) is uised tae denote the nummer o observations or replicates includit in a statistical sample.

In chemistry, N represents the element Nitrogen. In biochemistry, N is the ane-letter code seembol for the amino acid asparagine. It is an aa the seembol for the SI unit o force, the newton.

• Ν ν : Greek letter Nu
• П п (П п) : Cyrillic letter Pe
• Н н (Н н) : Cyrillic letter En
• И и (И и) : Cyrillic letter I
• Ń ń : Latin letter N wi acute
• Ñ ñ : Latin letter N wi tilde
• Ň ň : Latin letter N wi caron

¹ An aa for encodins based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodins.