Bet (letter)

Bet, Beth, Beh, or Vet is the second letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician bēt 𐤁 , Hebrew bēt ב‎, Aramaic bēṯ 𐡁, Syriac bēṯ ܒ, and Arabic bāʾ ب‎. Its sound value is the voiced bilabial stop ⟨b⟩ or the voiced labiodental fricative ⟨v⟩.

The letter's name means "house" in various Semitic languages (Arabic bayt, Akkadian bītu, bētu, Hebrew: bayīṯ, Phoenician bēt etc.; ultimately all from Proto-Semitic *bayt-), and appears to derive from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a house by acrophony.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to, among others, the Greek beta (Β, β), Latin B (B, b) and Cyrillic Be (Б, б) and Ve (В, в).