What б means
It writes the b-sound in Cyrillic words. The letter is called be; its older name is buky.
б goes back to early Slavic writing. Around the late 9th century, Cyrillic began replacing Glagolitic, an earlier Slavic alphabet, in Bulgaria. Both scripts served Church Slavonic, the language of Christian translations and worship. An early Cyrillic manuscript dates to 933. Over time, б became an ordinary spelling letter in the modern languages that use Cyrillic.
Why can Russian б sound like p?
Russian devoices б at the end of a word. Before a vowel it is a plain b; at the end, as in хлеб (bread), it sounds like p but is still spelled б. Ukrainian and Serbian keep the b-sound at word endings, so this is a Russian rule, not a Cyrillic one.
How do I type б on an English keyboard?
Add a Cyrillic layout, or use Unicode input. Your physical keys can stay English; switch the active layout in your device's language settings.
An ordinary spelling letter in Cyrillic text.
In usernames, web addresses and codes, check carefully: б and 6 are different characters.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Why does б show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type б
б\0431Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.