The
alveolar trill is a type of
consonantal sound, used in some spoken
languages. The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet that represents
dental,
alveolar, and
postalveolar trills is , and the equivalent
X-SAMPA symbol is
r. It is commonly called the
rolled R,
rolling R, or
trilled R. Quite often, is used in phonemic transcriptions (especially those found in dictionaries) of languages like
English and
German that have
rhotic consonants that are not an alveolar trill. This is partly due to ease of typesetting and partly because is the letter used in the orthographies of these languages.