N is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled en ()."N" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "en," op. cit. History of the form The most common snake hieroglyphic was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English 'J', because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet. It is speculated that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for "snake" may have begun with that sound. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was - as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages.