N is the 14th letter of modern English letters and ISO Basic Latin letters.

In Egyptian, snake is one of the most common hieroglyphs, which is used to represent sounds such as English ⟨ J ⟩ because the word "snake" in Egypt is jet type. Many people speculate that the Semites working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphs to create the first letter, and they used the same serpentine symbol to represent n, because their word "snake" might begin with the sound. However, in Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic letters, the letter name is nun, which in some languages means "fish.". The sound value of the letter is / N /, which is the same as Greek, Etruscan, Latin and modern languages.

In mathematics, the italicized form n is a particularly common symbol for variables representing integers.