Cyrillic Small Letter Pe

A p sound, as in “pen”. Ukrainian пес (dog) and Russian папа (dad) both start with it; its capital is П. Finer pronunciation details differ by language.

In Russian, the vowel after п shows whether it is plain or “soft”, said with the tongue raised toward a y sound: compare пол (floor) and пел (sang). That Russian rule does not carry over automatically; in Serbian, п is simply p.

Where does Cyrillic п come from?

It was adapted from the Greek capital letter Π. Cyrillic was developed at the end of the ninth century for Slavic church books, borrowing many letter shapes from Greek. Glagolitic, an older Slavic alphabet with very different-looking letters, belongs to the same early history but is a separate script.

The earliest Cyrillic manuscripts date from the 10th century, and a 921 inscription near Preslav, in Bulgaria, is among the oldest known Cyrillic texts. From the 12th century, regional Church Slavonic writing (the language of Slavic church books) showed local variation. As Cyrillic spread, п entered the spelling of many languages.

How do I type п?

Switch to a Cyrillic keyboard layout; the key depends on the layout. On the standard Ukrainian and Russian layouts, the QWERTY G key gives п and Shift+G gives П. Phonetic layouts, which match Cyrillic letters to similar-sounding Latin keys, usually put п on P instead.