Latin Small Letter R
The eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, lowercase 'r' appears in roughly 6% of English text. It exhibits remarkable phonetic variation across languages — from the alveolar trill of Spanish to the uvular fricative of French to the approximant of most English dialects. In ASCII it occupies code point 114 (0x72), 32 above uppercase 'R' at 82 (0x52). The escape sequence '\r' (ASCII 13) represents the carriage return — central to the CR vs LF vs CRLF line-ending split that affects text file portability across operating systems.
Technical Details
Code Example
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// return sends value back to callerint add(int a, int b) {return a + b; // Return sum}int result = add(3, 4); // result == 7
Common Usage
Carriage return escape: In C-style string syntax and most mainstream programming languages, the escape sequence '\r' represents the carriage return character (ASCII 13, U+000D) — entirely distinct from the printable letter 'r' at code point 114. This control character is central to line-ending conventions: Windows uses \r\n (CR+LF), classic Mac OS (pre-OS X) used \r alone, and Unix/Linux/macOS use \n only.
Raw string prefix: In Python, prefixing a string literal with 'r' (e.g., r'\n' yields a literal backslash followed by 'n') suppresses escape-sequence interpretation, which is especially valuable for regular expression patterns and Windows file paths. Rust adopts a similar convention with r"..." and r#"..."# raw string literals. In both languages the prefix signals that backslashes carry no special meaning.
Phonetic diversity: The letter 'r' maps to a wider range of speech sounds across languages than almost any other consonant — the alveolar trill /r/ in Spanish and Italian, the uvular fricative /ʁ/ in standard French and many German dialects, the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ in several Indic languages, and the postalveolar approximant /ɹ/ dominant in English.
Diacritical variants: ř (háček) is a distinct letter in Czech representing the raised alveolar trill /r̝/, a sound famously rare among world languages. ŕ (acute) marks a syllabic /r/ in Slovak, ṛ (dot below) appears in IAST transliteration of Sanskrit for the retroflex flap, and ṟ (line below) is used in transliteration schemes for Tamil and other Dravidian languages.
Carriage return escape: In C-style string syntax and most mainstream programming languages, the escape sequence '\r' represents the carriage return character (ASCII 13, U+000D) — entirely distinct from the printable letter 'r' at code point 114. This control character is central to line-ending conventions: Windows uses \r\n (CR+LF), classic Mac OS (pre-OS X) used \r alone, and Unix/Linux/macOS use \n only.
Raw string prefix: In Python, prefixing a string literal with 'r' (e.g., r'\n' yields a literal backslash followed by 'n') suppresses escape-sequence interpretation, which is especially valuable for regular expression patterns and Windows file paths. Rust adopts a similar convention with r"..." and r#"..."# raw string literals. In both languages the prefix signals that backslashes carry no special meaning.
Phonetic diversity: The letter 'r' maps to a wider range of speech sounds across languages than almost any other consonant — the alveolar trill /r/ in Spanish and Italian, the uvular fricative /ʁ/ in standard French and many German dialects, the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ in several Indic languages, and the postalveolar approximant /ɹ/ dominant in English.
Diacritical variants: ř (háček) is a distinct letter in Czech representing the raised alveolar trill /r̝/, a sound famously rare among world languages. ŕ (acute) marks a syllabic /r/ in Slovak, ṛ (dot below) appears in IAST transliteration of Sanskrit for the retroflex flap, and ṟ (line below) is used in transliteration schemes for Tamil and other Dravidian languages.