L

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

L ( /ˈɛl/; named el, rarely ell)^[1] is the twelveth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents 1 History 2 Pronunciation 3 Codes for computing 4 See also 5 References

History

Egyptian hieroglyph	Proto-Semitic Lamd	Phoenician lamedh	Etruscan L	Greek Lambda

Pronunciation

In English, L can have several values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The alveolar lateral approximant (the sound which the IPA uses the lowercase [l] to represent) occurs before a vowel, as in lip or please, while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA [ɫ]) occurs in bell and milk (see Dark L). This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use L; it is also a factor making the pronunciation of L difficult for users of languages that either lack, or have different values, for L^, such as Japanese or some southern dialects of Chinese.

L can occur before almost any plosive, fricative, or affricate in English. Common digraphs include LL, which has a value identical to L in English, but has the separate value voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (IPA /ɬ/) in Welsh, where it can appear in an initial position.

A palatal lateral approximant or palatal L (IPA /ʎ/) occurs in many languages, and is represented by GL in Italian, LL in Spanish and Catalan, LH in Portuguese, and Ļ in Latvian.

In English writing, L is often silent in such words as walk or could (its presence modifies other letters' sounds, i.e. 'wak' might be more likely to be pronounced such that it would rhyme with 'back').

Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital L is codepoint U+004C and the lowercase l is U+006C. In some fonts, a lowercase l may be difficult to distinguish from a 1 (one) or an uppercase letter I (i). A more stylized version based on the handwritten ℓ is sometimes used in mathematics and elsewhere. Its codepoint is U+2113 and its numeric character reference is "ℓ". Capital I (i) can also be hard to distinguish from a lowercase l (L), as many fonts use a vertical bar for both of these characters. In recent times, many new fonts have curved the lower-case form to the right and is increasingly common, especially on European road signs and advertisements.

The ASCII code for capital L is 76 and for lowercase l is 108; or in binary 01001100 and 01101100.

The EBCDIC code for capital L is 211 and for lowercase l is 147.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "L" and "l" for upper and lower case respectively.

L is commonly used in a form of an emoticon :L (laughing face).

See also

• Ł
• Ll
• £
• Л, л - El (Cyrillic)
• Λ, λ - Lambda (Greek)

References

Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter L with diacritics Ĺ弾ĻļḶḷḸḹḼḽḺḻŁłĿŀȽƚⱠⱡⱢɫɬᶅɭȴ history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646