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  Cursive script 'm' and capital 'M'
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M (named em /ˈɛm/)[1] is the thirteenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
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History [edit]
The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water. It is known[dubious ] that Semitic people working in Egypt c. 2000 BC borrowed a hieroglyph for "water" that was first used for an alveolar nasal (/n/), because of the Egyptian word for water, n-t. This same symbol became used for /m/ in Semitic, because the word for water began with that sound.
| Egyptian hieroglyph "N" | Phoenician mem |
Etruscan M | Greek mu |
Roman M | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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The letter 'm' represents the bilabial consonant sound, [m], in Classical languages as well as the modern languages. The Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) says that 'm' is sometimes a vowel in words like spasm and in the suffix -ism. In modern terminology, this would be described as a syllabic consonant — IPA [m̩].
Related letters and other similar characters [edit]
- Μ μ : Greek letter Mu
- М м : Cyrillic letter Em
Computing codes [edit]
| Character | M | m | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M | LATIN SMALL LETTER M | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 77 | U+004D | 109 | U+006D |
| UTF-8 | 77 | 4D | 109 | 6D |
| Numeric character reference | M | M | m | m |
| EBCDIC family | 212 | D4 | 148 | 94 |
| ASCII 1 | 77 | 4D | 109 | 6D |
- 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations [edit]
References [edit]
- ^ "M" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "em," op. cit.
External links [edit]
Media related to M at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of M at Wiktionary- The dictionary definition of m at Wiktionary
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | ||
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Letter M with diacritics
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| Ḿḿ | Ṁṁ | Ṃṃ | ᵯ | ᶆ | Ɱɱ | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Related
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