8 August: R

Today is R Day, according to a spoof list of daily celebrations by the Immortal Society. 10 things you never knew about the letter R.

1. The letter r is the eighth most common letter in English and the fourth-most common consonant, after t, n, and s.

2. A small capital R in a circle is the registered trademark symbol.

3. In Morse Code it’s ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ and in the NATO phonetic alphabet it’s Romeo.

4. In mathematics, a lower case r is the symbol representing the radius of a circle.

5. It is believed to have derived from a symbol of a head in ancient alphabets.

6. R is sometimes referred to as the littera canīna 'canine letter', or the dog's letter. This comes from the pronunciation of the letter where it can be trilled to sound like a Dog growling.

7. In the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough, John Cleese played a character named R.

8. The three Rs is a phrase coined in the 19^th century in education to denote the most basic things kids learn: reading, writing and arithmetic. It’s based on phonetics rather than spelling, although arithmetic may have been more commonly referred to at the time as “reckoning”.

9. An R rating of the Motion Picture Association film rating system denotes media, such as movies, that are intended for a restricted audience.

10. R was the production code for the 1965 Doctor Who serial The Chase.

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