• eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, fourteenth consonant
  • phonetic name: "alveolar approximant"; sound: place the tip of your tongue close to your alveolar ridge and use your vocal chords to make a slight vibration (n.b.: if you lift your tongue, the sound becomes an 'L'...)
  • Proto-Sinaitic sign was the profile of a head
  • Egyptian hieroglyph was a mouth
  • Phoenician letter became resh; Hebrew became rosh (both meaning head)
  • Greeks adopted it as their letter rho (uppercase Ρ, lowercase ρ); also had a value of 100
  • Romans adopted the Greek rho and add the diagonal leg we still use today; had a value of 80; Greeks also gave birth to "rh" words such as rhetoric, rhythm, etc.
  • lower case r came into existence in the early Middle Ages
  • common in most letter consonant combos: br, cr, dr, fr, gr, pr, tr, spr, str, shr, thr, etc.
  • nicknamed littera canina (the canine letter) by Roman poet Persius, mid-first century AD; also: "'R' is the dog's letter, and hurreth in the sound - the tongue strking the inner palate with a trembling about the teeth." - Ben Jonson
  • 7 of the 12 months have the letter R
  • R is the first of 7 given letters in the Wheel of Fortune bonus round (R, S, T, L, N, E)
  • French have a characteristic rolling/purring pronunciation of the letter R
  • R has a tendency to be dropped when found at the end of words, notably in Brooklyn, NY and Boston, MA (ie. water vs. watah)
  • associated with force, rage, rumbling, return
  • R in mathematics designates a set of real numbers
  • R in a circle, ®, is the registered trademark symbol
  • Rx (℞) means medical prescription, and comes from the Latin word for "recipe"
  • r in geometry refers to radius (as in P=2πr)
  • in film ratings, R stands for restricted, meaning that children under 17 must be accompanied by an adult
  • in education, the 3 Rs refer loosely to "Reading, wRiting and aRithmatic"
  • in American politics, R is often used as an abbreviation for a Republican
  • phonetic sound, "awr", is a conjugation of the verb "to be" (I am, you are), collective possession (our), or the sound a pirate makes (arrr...)
  • NATO phonetic alphabet: ROMEO
  • "'R' is the porter resting on his staff." -Victor Hugo, French poet & playwright
  • "The sound vibration of the consonant 'R' means 'radiance, radiating light, abundance'." - Joseph E. Rael
  • R can also abbreviate rabbi, radical, radius, railway, rare, recipe, rector, regiment, regina, resistance, response, rex, right, road, rod, Romania, rook, rouble, royal, ruled, run, rupee