The letter B in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 1 and 2 make a short vertical line down the left column. Feel for the line rather than counting dots — that is how fluent readers actually read.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and B is part of the family that starts with b. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. Learning the family together is far faster than learning B on its own, because one shape gives you three letters. The braille alphabet chart shows every family in one place.

Move it down a row and it becomes punctuation

Take the shape of B and slide every dot down one position — dot 1 becomes dot 2, dot 4 becomes dot 5, and so on. The result is semicolon.

This is how the punctuation marks were built, which makes them much less work to learn than they look: if you know the first ten letters you already know the shapes, and only have to remember they sit lower in the cell. The full punctuation table follows the same pattern.

B is also the digit 2

The first ten letters double as the digits. Put a number sign — dots 3-4-5-6 — in front, and every letter that follows reads as a number until a space or a letter sign ends the run. So B on its own is the letter, but after a number sign it is 2.

This is the single commonest source of confusion for people reading braille numbers — a run of digits takes one number sign at the start, not one per digit. How braille numbers work covers the whole rule.

Where B turns up in Grade 2

Standing on its own with spaces either side, B is not a letter at all — it is the whole word “but”. Inside a longer word it goes back to being an ordinary b. That is the rule beginners trip on most: but is a single cell, but the b in a word like “boy” is just a letter.

Writing a capital B

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital B is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from B by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with B, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.