b · verb1
Abbreviations.
B · character, numeral2
From the Old English letter B, from 7th century replacement by Latin B of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc letter ᛒ (b, beorc).
B · noun, symbol3
From abbreviations of various terms beginning with or containing the letter ‘B’. * (billion): abbreviation of billion * (cricket): abbreviation of balls * (bitch): abbreviation of bitch
B · noun4
From the use of the letter ‘B’ as an arbitrary label among other letter labels. * (personality type): from contrast with the letter ‘A’ and its corresponding personality type * (academic grade): from the position of the letter ‘B’ in the English alphabet
B · proper noun5
Possibly a contraction of BCPL (“Basic Combined Programming Language”), the name of a programming language from which B was derived. Dennis Ritchie (a coworker of B’s designer, Ken Thompson) speculated that B might be based on Bon (the name of an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on Multics), itself either from Bonnie (the name of Thompson’s wife) or “(according to an encyclopedia quotation in its manual), after a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.