It is speculated by some, such as archeologist Douglas Petrovich, that Semitic speakers working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphs to create the first alphabet.

[5] The name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some of these languages.

This possibly connects the letter to the hieroglyph for a water ripple, which phonetically makes the n sound.

The Portuguese and Vietnamese spelling for this sound is ⟨nh⟩, while Spanish, Breton, and a few other languages use the letter ⟨ñ⟩.

A common digraph with ⟨n⟩ is ⟨ng⟩, which represents a voiced velar nasal /ŋ/ in a variety of languages.