B in Different Fonts

A house that became a B

The Phoenician letter beth meant “house”, and its early shape was a simple enclosure with an opening. Greek turned it into beta, and the Romans gave it the two rounded bowls of the modern B. The word alphabet itself is built from the first two Greek letter names, alpha and beta, so B is half of the word for the whole system.

Lowercase b developed in Roman and medieval handwriting, when scribes dropped the upper bowl and let the stem rise above the line. That ascender is why b, d, p and q are mirror and rotated copies of each other in so many fonts, and why upside-down text simply swaps b for q.

The script B gap

B is one of eleven letters that the mathematical script alphabet borrows from the older Letterlike Symbols block. The script capital B is ℬ (U+212C), not a character in the math range. In practice:

If you’re styling a name that starts with B, like Bella or Ben, the regular script capital can look like it came from a different font. Bold cursive 𝓑 avoids that and is the better pick for a monogram. It is also the version shown on the cursive B page for anyone who wants to type rather than write it.

The red B

Black squares turn B into 🅱, and on most phones that character is drawn as a red emoji. It’s one of four blood-type emoji (🅰 🅱 🅾 🅿). It also has its own internet history: the “🅱️” meme, where people replace letters in a word with it. If you want black-square text without a random red letter, try the outline squared 🄱 or the black bubble 🅑 from the bubble text generator.

B look-alikes that are other letters

Several symbol styles use characters that resemble B but already mean something:

• ß in the accented style is the German sharp s, read “ss”. Using it for B can turn “Bob” into nonsense for a German reader.
• ฿ in the currency style is the Thai baht sign (U+0E3F), which is fine for decoration but carries a real meaning.
• Б in faux Cyrillic is the Russian letter be, which actually makes a /b/ sound, so that one is a fair swap.
• Β (Greek beta, U+0392) and В (Cyrillic ve, U+0412) look exactly like Latin B. The Cyrillic one is pronounced /v/, and lowercase в looks like a small capital B. Both are used in spoofed usernames, which is why platforms that check for mixed scripts reject them.

The runic style uses ᛒ, the Elder Futhark rune berkanan, which really did stand for /b/. The mapping is playful rather than a transliteration, but for B the match is historically right.

Small, tiny and missing

B shrinks unevenly:

• Small caps: ʙ (U+0299), from IPA Extensions, where it stands for a bilabial trill.
• Superscript: ᴮ and ᵇ both exist.
• Subscript: none. B isn’t among the 17 letters Unicode gives a subscript form, so a styled word like ₛᵤb keeps a normal b.

If you need a tiny word with B in it, use the small text generator, which picks the superscript set where B is available.

How often B appears

B accounts for about 1.5% of letters in English text, so it is uncommon in running prose but frequent at the start of names and brands. That makes the capital the form that matters most, and the reason the ℬ gap gets noticed more than it would on a letter used mid-word.