Latin Small Letter P
Known in English for going silent at the start of words borrowed from Greek — psychology, pneumonia, pterodactyl — lowercase 'p' is the sixteenth letter of the Latin alphabet and a voiceless bilabial plosive accounting for roughly 1.9 % of characters in typical English corpora. Its ASCII code point is 112 (0x70), 32 above its uppercase counterpart 'P' at 80 (0x50), maintaining the single-bit case offset (bit 5) shared by all ASCII A–Z / a–z pairs.
Technical Details
Code Example
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// Pointer naming convention with 'p' prefixint value = 42;int *pValue = &value; // Pointer to valueprintf("Value: %d, Pointer: %p\n", *pValue, (void *)pValue);
Common Usage
Silent Greek-origin clusters: The initial combinations ps- (psalm, psychiatry), pn- (pneumatic, pneumonia), and pt- (pterodactyl, Ptolemy) preserve Greek spelling while dropping the /p/ sound in Modern English pronunciation — a pattern that regularly appears in spelling difficulty lists and standardized test preparation materials.
Printf pointer format: In C-family printf-style formatting, %p outputs a pointer's address in an implementation-defined format — typically hexadecimal prefixed with 0x. It is the standard way to inspect memory addresses during debugging, distinct from %x in that it is explicitly typed for pointers and may include formatting not available through other integer specifiers.
Unicode property escapes in regex: In PCRE, Perl, Java, and JavaScript (with the 'u' flag), the \p{...} syntax matches characters by Unicode property — \p{L} for any letter, \p{Sc} for currency symbols, \p{Greek} for Greek script characters. This prefix (with its negation \P{...}) provides one of the more powerful character classification mechanisms available in modern regex engines.
Diacritical variants: Compared to vowels, 'p' has a limited diacritical family — ṗ (dot above) appears in Old Irish orthography, ṕ (acute) exists in some transliteration systems, and ƥ (hook) is used in certain African language orthographies — a relatively sparse set within Unicode.
Silent Greek-origin clusters: The initial combinations ps- (psalm, psychiatry), pn- (pneumatic, pneumonia), and pt- (pterodactyl, Ptolemy) preserve Greek spelling while dropping the /p/ sound in Modern English pronunciation — a pattern that regularly appears in spelling difficulty lists and standardized test preparation materials.
Printf pointer format: In C-family printf-style formatting, %p outputs a pointer's address in an implementation-defined format — typically hexadecimal prefixed with 0x. It is the standard way to inspect memory addresses during debugging, distinct from %x in that it is explicitly typed for pointers and may include formatting not available through other integer specifiers.
Unicode property escapes in regex: In PCRE, Perl, Java, and JavaScript (with the 'u' flag), the \p{...} syntax matches characters by Unicode property — \p{L} for any letter, \p{Sc} for currency symbols, \p{Greek} for Greek script characters. This prefix (with its negation \P{...}) provides one of the more powerful character classification mechanisms available in modern regex engines.
Diacritical variants: Compared to vowels, 'p' has a limited diacritical family — ṗ (dot above) appears in Old Irish orthography, ṕ (acute) exists in some transliteration systems, and ƥ (hook) is used in certain African language orthographies — a relatively sparse set within Unicode.