Pe (Persian letter)

Pe (پ) is a letter in the Persian alphabet and the Kurdish alphabet used to represent the voiceless bilabial plosive ⟨p⟩.^[1] It is based on bā' (ب) with two additional diacritic dots. It is one of the five letters that were created specifically for the Persian alphabet to symbolize sounds found in Persian but not in Standard Arabic, others being ژ, چ, and گ, in addition the obsolete ڤ.^[2][3] In name and shape, it is a variant of be (ب). It is used in Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, and other Iranian languages, Uyghur, Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Shina, and Turkic languages (before the Latin and Cyrillic scripts were adopted). Its numerical value is 2000 (see Abjad numerals).

It is one of additional common foreign letters that are sometimes used in some Arabic dialects to represent foreign sounds, it represents /p/ in loanwords and it can be substituted by ب /b/ such as in protein which is written as بروتين /broːtiːn/ or پروتين /proːtiːn/. In Egypt, the letter is called be be-talat noʾaṭ (به بتلات نقط [be beˈtælæt ˈnoʔɑtˤ], "be with three dots"). In Israel, the letter is sometimes used to transliterate names containing /p/ into Arabic, when that sound originates in non-Semitic languages; when the /p/ sound comes from a Hebrew word, there is normally an Arabic translation instead.

When representing this sound in transliteration of Persian into Hebrew, it is written as ב׳.