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M (named em /ˈɛm/)[1] is the 13th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
Contents
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph "n" | -Phoenician Mem |
Etruscan M | Greek Mu |
Roman M | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
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The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water. It is thought 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.
Use in writing systems
The letter ⟨m⟩ represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound [m] in the orthography of Latin as well as in that of many modern languages, and also in the International Phonetic Alphabet. In English, 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 is described as a syllabic consonant (IPA [m̩]).
Other uses
The Roman numeral Ⅿ represents the number 1000, though it was not used in Roman times.[2]
Related characters
Ancestors, descendants and siblings
- 𐤌 : Semitic letter Mem, from which the following symbols originally derive
- Μ μ : Greek letter Mu, from which M derives
- М м : Cyrillic letter Em, also derived from Mu
- IPA-specific symbols related to M: ɱ
- M with diacritics: Ḿ ḿ Ṁ ṁ Ṃ ṃ
Ligatures and abbreviations
- ₥ : Mill (currency)
- ™ : Trademark symbol
- ℠ : Service mark symbol
Computing codes
| 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
References
- ↑ "M" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "em," op. cit.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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