The original Semitic letter was probably inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for "head", pronounced t-p in Egyptian, but it was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was Rêš (also the name of the letter). It developed into Greek Ρ (Rhô) and Latin R. It is likely that some Etruscan and Western Greek forms of the letter added the extra stroke to distinguish it from a later form of the letter P.The minuscule (lower-case) form of r developed through several variations on the capital form. In handwriting it was common not to close the bottom of the loop but continue into the leg, saving an extra pen stroke. The loop-leg stroke shortened into the simple arc used today. Another minuscule, r rotunda (ꝛ), kept the loop-leg stroke but dropped the vertical stroke. It fell out of use around the 18th century.
The letter R is sometimes referred to as the littera canina (canine letter). This phrase has Latin origins: the Latin R was trilled so it sounds like a snarling dog. A good example of a trilling R is the Spanish word for dog, perro. A Word A Day: Dog's letter In '' William Shakespeare'sRomeo and Juliet'', such a reference is made by Juliet's nurse in Act 2, scene 4, when she calls the letter R "the dog's name." The reference is also found in Ben Jonson's English Grammar.
Codes for computing
In Unicode, the capital R is codepoint U+0052 and the lower case r is U+0072.The ASCII code for capital R is 82 and for lowercase r is 114; or in binary 01010010 and 01110010, correspondingly.The EBCDIC code for capital R is 217 and for lowercase r is 153.The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "R" and "r" for upper and lower case respectively.
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