Phoenician pe — "mouth", through Greek pi.
P
the letter for the sound your lips make was drawn as a mouth. Phoenician naming was that direct throughout. ⚠️ A coincidence worth knowing but not worth explaining: Greek Ρ is our R and Greek Π is our P — the shapes cross, though the two letters descend from different Phoenician signs.
Campbell · Carpenter · Chapman · Cooper · Draper · Esposito · Harper · Lopez · Murphy · Palmer · Parker · Patterson · Payne · Perez
In the modern alphabet this letter is number 16 of 26. Before it comes O, after it Q. The order itself is inherited: Latin took it from Greek, Greek from Phoenician, and the sequence has survived largely unchanged for about three thousand years. Every rearrangement since has been an insertion, not a reshuffle.
This is a consonant: it sets the hardness of a name and how it meets the next word. In a corpus of 315 surnames this letter opens 14 and closes 0. Among the 96 given names in the base it appears in 9. The surname carrying the most of it is Phillips, with 2.
Joseph · Christopher · Paul · Patrick · Peter · Sophia · Philip · Patricia · Stephanie
These letters came from the Greek alphabet.